Some snapshots of my recent trip to Malaysia…

This post was nearly called ‘Make Friends-Friends Move’ or even ‘The Nature of the Beast’ but at 1 am in the morning I decided on the title ‘Au Revoir Peng you’ which translated from French and Chinese into English is something like ‘so long friend’ right? At this stage of year in an international school it is all about endings, the joy of ending another year with report writing coupled with the sadness over saying goodbye to students, teachers and friends.

Now you have to realize this is a first for me. I LOVE MY SLEEP. I do not get up in the middle of the night to do anything let alone blog. BUT something just happened and I started writing this post in my sleep and I got thinking and thinking and thinking and bang! I just had to get up and get started.My vision is to have a super cute shot of Hannah and Syd and Mimi and Sojo on here within the next couple of days, (well hey, that is what this post is about isn’t it? I only have a couple of days, well, four to be exact to catch these little peng you’s on film) and my vision includes having them wearing matching clothes! Sick I know but I can’t help myself, I started thinking about Mimi and Sojo in their little turqoise spotties and then before you know it I also had Han and Syd in their pink or even their stripey H & M’s. We will see if I can pull off the photo, I have no control of that in the middle of the night but I can at least work on the post…

Sydney and Hannah…a special friendship.

So we are going out on a high with our friends the Munno’s (aka Jen, Tim and Sydney Munnerlyn. We have been getting friendlier by the day for the last three years, brought together by a couple of 4 year old girls, we have formed and sustained our own grown-up friendship that will be the one that carries us into the future. We fly to Melbourne on Friday for a summer/winter break and we return to Shanghai in August…the Munno’s fly to the States on Saturday and will start school again in August…but in Abu Dhabi!

It has caused us to think about friendship and transience and beginnings, endings and in betweens. It has made us happy at the thought of seeing them again under different circumstances and sad at the farewell to all that we know and the routineness of our time together here; the things we have come to expect and take for granted. Most of our friendship has been pre-Mimi and we think of those days as the golden days of parenting an only child. Golden only in that it was like having all the benefits of two children but without the extra responsibility, Sydney was the daughter we got to have over but never discipline, she brightened our days without ever darkening our mood. She and Hannah have clocked up many hours together on weekends and weeknights, on school buses and in school playgrounds, and even in Phuket and Koh Samui! Believe me, it hasn’t always been perfect, there have been tantrums, traumas and tears but mostly Sydney and Hannah being friends meant that Jen and Tim and Simon and I were able to claim back some of those pre-children days as we could trade off time on weekends and take turns looking after the two of them while we went out and about exploring Shanghai, spending time together knowing that they were happy and we could be guilt-free in our explorations.

But on top of their friendship, the bonus of a grown up friendship slowly developed which saw us booking flights in advance to Thailand and just hoping we would all still get on…and get on we did…for two trips; one to Koh Samui- a five night test run and later with more confidence-7 nights in Phuket.

So knowing we will see them again, but not knowing what is around the corner in the future, makes a melancholy soul like me reflect on the past a little and lament the loss of what was.

We have so far said goodbye to Isabella and I am sad to say I didn’t get a chance to have a proper goodbye with Lydia today…soon it will be the whole of 5KP.
Thank you to you all for some lovely blog comments lately students, I am very touched with your kindness and enthusiasm. I have really enjoyed being your teacher.
See you tomorrow for our last full classroom day together.
Mrs P

Yesterday our 5KP class celebrated another ‘last’ experience. It was the last time we would all be together as a group as Jonathan was about to leave for a little holiday and while he was gone Isabella and Lydia would also be leaving us. Therefore we decided that because of that and the fact it was Jon’s 12th birthday, we would have a party. Hooray!

So here are the 17 students I had the pleasure of finishing the year with, and eating that giant cake with. Have you ever seen anything like it? Wow, thanks again for the great lunch of sushi, snacks, drinks and cake.

Wow, what a huge week it has been for the 5th grade fund-raisers…so much counting, so little time! But when I think of the two weeks the earthquake victims have had I realize I have nothing to complain about. Today our class collected 2678.4 but as you can see a lot of it was in jiao and had the students busy for awhile. I wonder how many more times it will be counted before it reaches the people that need it.

I was at the copy market on the weekend talking to a vendor friend who told me that last week in one hour the stall holders donated over 80,000 rmb to help the victims of May 12th. Everyone is digging deep all over China, so many people have been moved by this disaster and it is probably not the focus at this stage of the year with less than 3 months until the Olympics.

migration-of-5th-grade-students.kmz

is a site where Mr Utecht has been creating a google earth map of  where our students have lived and live now.

Check it out!

The only negative point about the entire field day was that Lydia was not there to shoot baskets for us in a fund-raising effort for the earthquake victims…I am sure she would have doubled our high score of 189 points (rmb). Other than that it was a huge success with students enjoying themselves as they earned points for their respective houses.

I would love it if you took a look at some of the photos for the day on our flickr site. My tag is always kpower if you are unable to locate the pictures. There are also pictures of our fundraising efforts taking place and as soon as I get a shot of Arthur ‘doing his speech’ I will load up our ‘healthy meal’ photos too. Feel free to copy any of the photos you like onto your own blog by right clicking and going to copy image location and putting it into the little tree area on your ‘write a post’ section…Any of you smarties who can explain that in more techy terms…please…be my guest!

Have a great weekend my wonderful 5th graders, you deserve it!

P.S. We hit the 20,000 rmb mark with our fund-raising collections today, congratulations and keep up the great effort.

Congratulations to the Elementary Students in Pudong who have really embraced the idea to raise money for the victims of this month’s earthquake and cyclone.

At the end of our 3rd day 5KP have now collected 18,811.20 rmb…yes that last little .20 is 20 jiao and much of our money has been in jiao but there have been plenty of 100 rmb notes in there too and your generosity has added up to an amazing effort so far.

I am very proud of the attitude that I have have seen this week, congratulations and continue to dig deep for the next week or so.