Sunrise & Sundorne News: March 2011

Sharing ideas!

As you may have seen before our Year 8 students are doing a project based around zodiac signs in different cultures. They have learnt about themselves based on information related to the time, day, date and year of their birth. We are now sharing this information with Estelle so she can run the project with some of her Burmese students.

I am sending Estelle some of the worksheets we made to help the students develop their ideas:

They used these to either copy from or trace over the animals that represented them in Burmese and Chinese zodiacs. We also looked at Native American Indian astrology as well.

This is the Burmese garuda - turns out I am a garuda! I am also a pig and a raven - all of these creatures have various traits which I am supposed to possess. The students really enjoyed finding out about their animals and their character traits.

I produced some designs ideas to help students consider what was important layout issues in a poster. I also loaded information up on our http://sundorneart.blogspot.com/ blog which we discussed.

We made some fact sheets so students could collect all their information.

And here are some examples, they are not yet finished but they are still striking pieces of work!
We spent time looking at colour theory and painting techniques to help the students achieve a strong visual piece.

Hopefully this will help Estelle teach this project with her Burmese students.

Burma Bake Off!

Year 8 students spent their art lesson yesterday making chocolate cup cakes and

rice crispie cakes to sell to the rest of the school and staff. The money raised will

be used to send chocolate for easter to the students in Mae La Oo.

These rice crispie cakes are so easy to make and we sold out very quickly

They were almost as popular with the staff as they were with the students!

Cup cakes are always easy to sell, everybody loves chocolate, and anything with icing on is a winner with the students.

This was the temptation for all true chocoholics!

A large chocolate cake was the raffel prize up for grabs at the cake sale.

Selling was fast and furious once the bell went for morning break, we only has 20

mins to sell our cakes, staff and students did not let us down, by the end of break

all that was left were the crumbs on the plates.

Making cakes!

8.3 made cakes this morning ready to sell in our Burma Bake Off! We are hoping to make money to send chocolate for Easter as they celebrate Easter aswell!

Let's hope sales go well!

Karen New Year in Mae La Oon refugee camp

Karen new Year in Mae La Oon Camp

Yaung Nii Oo school dance group

Shorthly before Christmas, Karen new year festival took place. As we mentioned

in a previous post, there are many new years, as many as there are ethnic peoples.

The dates vary and they are usually based on the lunar calendar. Here in Thailand

were 3 weeks away from Songkran, the theravada boudhist new year, celebrated

in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Sri Lanka. But i'm getting carried away...!

To celebrate Karen New year, dance groups rehearse and perform the

Dawn Dance. The "Dawn Dance" (nothing to do with dawn, it means New Year)

are performed by boys and grils, men and women. Actually the dancers sing and

dance at the same time, while drummers play. One must be pretty fit to finish a

complete song because the dances are fairly energetic. The songs are happy and

very catching, the dancers dress up in traditional clothing, proud to continue their

cultural heritage.

Rehearsals

Practicing the Karen Dawn dance for Karen New year

Click here to watch the video

Rehearsal

The new year festival

Sunrirse students dance in front of the whole of Mae La Oon refugee camp

On the day, people gathered from all around the camp. Some people have to walk for an

hours to reach the festival grounds. The drum and the buffalo horns you can see on the gate

are the emblems of Karen people, the sunrising is part of the Karen flag.

After much waiting, we're ready to dance!

It means a lot for Sunrise school students to perform for the New Year festival because they can be shuned by other schools for learning in a schools that uses Burmese as the teaching language. By performing the Dawn dance, they show their love of Karen culture and assert thier identity as Karen youth.

Yaung Nii Oo student did a wonderful performance that night, demonstrating that the new generations will continue to care fro Karen traditions and arts.

Christmas in Yaung Nii Oo (Sunrise) school

Here is all the information on the Xmas festival at Sunrise School. Thank you everybody for your fund raising and support, as you will see it was much appreaciated and well spent!

raining misty weather for christmas

The Xmas festival for Sunrise students was full of fun activities. The first day started by the sport tournament with 5 teams taking part. It was a misty winter morning.

After playing football, badminton, Chin Lone and Htoh See Toh, the players took a rest for the next day's event: Fundraising food fair to donate to the elderly in the refugee camp and a dance and music show in the evening.Christmas mass was celebrated at the school too.

Yellow team

Opening ceremony for Christmas sport
competion
-Nyunt Baun team (mixed team)

Green team

Blue Team

Supporters

Football tournament

Girls football team- Half time

Girls back in the field

Boy's turn

Chin Lone (Takraw) played with feet and head only, the ball is made woven cane

Badminton

HToh See Toh

Htoh See Toh

Second Day: Food fair for fundraising

Elder people are very much respected and the younger generation takes care of them.

In the refugee camp, there are very little ways to earn money and this is even harder for older people, so students decided to fund raise and donate to the elders at Christmas.