Magic

CAS Project – Magic (card tricks)

Since I was exploring an activity which involve creative skills, I came up with an idea of performing card tricks. For my Creativity area, I am going to practice several magic (card tricks). My final target is to create my original magic and present what I learnt.

Why magic? I believe it is one of the best performance that exist in the world (may be too exaggerated?). It evokes various positive emotions such as surprise and joy. Also I think that it is one of the method that could break the language barriers. Although magic involves taking, it is very obvious and easy-to-follow what is happening; it is not about 'thinking', it is about 'feeling' the magic.

This week I learnt a magic called "Triumph".
First I will shuffle the cards one facing up and one facing down. Now I will have a deck of cards that includes cards some are face up and down. But if I do the Magic finger-snap, all cards will face up!

http://youtu.be/C0u5ieDJNeU

Tutor

As mentioned in the previous feedback section, since Shuntaro (my previous student) passed his STEP (oral) exam, I have completed my task. However, there was another parent, who heard about the improvement my student made in a short period of time, she offered me more work as a private tutor. So from this month, I am teaching another student from the Japanese School of Moscow and her name is Yukiko Hashimoto, year six.

When I received a new offer from her parent, I felt that I was actually doing something useful for other people. I believe that this success was the result of my efforts to improve my teaching skills and the quality of my lessons. Through this experience I have learnt the importance of preparation in order to maintain a high standard, as well as how to think from my students' point of view so that they could get the most out of our study sessions.

Unlike the first time teaching Shuntaro, I felt easier to teach Yukiko, perhaps, this is because that I already gained enough skills and techniques to teach.

We began our lesson by a simple introduction section, which we introduced ourselves and discussed her hobbies (in english). Then I prepared some textbooks to see her level of english. Her knowledge of English is a bit limited and it was her second time to have English lesson in her life. In the lessons, we went through the textbook.  From my previous experience, I felt that the use of textbook is very helpful in order to explain the use of tenses and phrases.

My main teaching target is to teach her basic English vocabularies and phrases for beginners, including alphabets i.e. a level that enables her to pass the “STEP test Grade4”.

In the next lesson we will continue solving questions on the book and while I will also explain the meaning of each word and try to answer her question.

Ice Hockey (Apr.)

Tutor Feedback (May)

This month we basically continue doing the questions on the textbook and we talk about my student’s dream.

Since she is a beginner English learner, she seems to struggle to communicate in English but I can see her trying to use as much words she knows.

Next month, I am planing to show her a short cartoon i.e. simpsons, because from my previous experience this motivates my student.

Tutor Feedback Section (Apr.)

14/02
Focus on vocabularies to describe photos and revise the words leant in previous lesson.
E.g. ‘there is/are…’ ‘He/she is doing…’ ‘I can see…’

Again we used the same text book as last week to practice and revise the phrases.
Today we practiced words to describe a picture because this is the most common question what he will get in the oral STEP test. Most works were done by my students since it was a lesson to practice describing a photo and I was asking question such as 'what can you see in this picture?'. My student found this exercise was quite easy and he seemed like he wants some more challenging question. So I will prepare some challenging material and questions for next lesson.

Feedback on The Photo Album Project

Feedback on The Photo Album Project

I have succeeded finish making the photo album within the planned time and give it to Chihiro (who just left Moscow) as a gift. The quality and the album itself amazed her, and she seemed pleased by the fact that she got an album.

However, making an album from scratch wasn’t an easy thing to do. There were several steps that I struggled but the hardest process was the photo selection and it took time to finish this process. The reason why it was time consuming is because I collected about 300 pictures in total but I could only use 36 photos from them, which means I have to make a lot of decisions to pic the best one. This process requires time and the most annoying thing was it was really hard to choose the best one because most of the picture was good.

Then I came out a ‘rating’ method to solve this problem – first I chose 5 pictures that I liked the best and then I rated all the pictures one to five stars (five stars mean the best quality). I ended with having 40 pictures with 5 stars. It is a huge progress compared with the beginning having 300 pictures. This method was very effective – it was less stressful because instead of just choosing 36 pictures at once from 300 pieces, I just had to rate all the pictures 1 to 5 by comparing to the 5 pictures that I chose at the beginning. Having a standard to follow and compare makes the process easier.

Then I the software called Aperture to edit those photos. During this step I learnt how to the software properly and I created a preset of filter which is able to use on most pictures. This preset have made the process less time consuming since I just have to apply the filter (preset) to all the photos and it was able to do it only by few clicks though the photos still looked very nice.

Other process went quite good and everything, such as printing and putting those photo in to the album, were done on time. At the end I also asked Chihiro’s friends to write some messages on the pictures to make the album even better and unique.

Overall, I think this project was very successful and I learnt many things such as method to select pictures and how to edit them nicely. Although this project took about a month to complete it, I gained knowledge on several areas as mentioned before and they could be applied on next time, therefore I think it was a good use of time.

Ice Hockey (Mar.)