By: Owen Wang
Every term in Luwan BC, we will have our Chit Chat competition and newspaper show. From my perspective, chit chat means that you need to communicate with everyone, whether your classmates or teachers in English at all times, anywhere in school. The purpose of this game is to practice our English communication skill. As we all know, when we go to the university in Canada, everything around us will become English. You must ask for help from your classmates and professors in English, so chit chat can help you to adapt to living abroad more easily and quickly in the future.
For the rules, the competition lasts about a month. Everyone will get three cards every day. If somebody is caught when he or she was speaking Chinese, he or she will lose a card, and eventually their group will lose points after school. Finally, the group with the lowest score will be required to sing a song in English that they have adapted in front of everyone. The winning group will get a pizza party which is paid for by the school. This is why our students enjoy this activity. They would inform each other they were speaking Chinese in order to get teachers to take away other people’s cards. Most importantly, some teachers are also keen on this “taking card” game. For instance, they will often approach you quietly, and when you whisper in Chinese, they will suddenly appear to take your card. So it is not easy to spend four weeks without losing a card. Many students think that chit chat provides us an opportunity to communicate in English. It creates a learning atmosphere for communication in English, and helps us improve our English-speaking skills. But sometimes communication with others may be reduced because individual words are unknown.
For our newspaper show, it’s an activity about designing clothes. Six teams need to use newspapers and tapes to design clothes which is similar to their team colour. There are a lot of different kinds of characters that were made, for example, a fire-breathing dragon from the red team，Green Lantern and Green Arrow from the green team, Warriors vs. Godzilla, and so on. But my preference is the characters made by grey team: Cai Xukun who is a boy devoted to music in “Just Because You’re So Beautiful”. He is a popular and very funny idol in China, especially for his dance. The students in grey team simulated his dance almost just like the original dance. This made everyone in the room burst into laughter, and the grey team won the championship without a doubt. On top of that, our teacher also made a character. He held a scepter in his left hand, a hamburger in his right, and a crown on his head. We called him “Burger King”.
Both Chit Chat and the newspaper show lead us to get many harvest. They not only help us to get used to the environment and life of university in advance, but also train our communication and critical thinking skill.