UES 6

For this year, UES has started a new project which concentrates on recycling. We collect plastics, metals, papers, second hand items and used electronics. All the items that we collected will donated to the Eden Handicap Center. This project will be one of our major project this year including the beach cleaning and environmental week. This project will help reducing wasting materials and also help the Eden Handicap Center. Reusing materials that aren't needed anymore is one of the most efficient way of recycling. Hope that this project will succeed and will be carried on for the rest of the year with the UES.

U18 Boys' Basketball Coaching

Today was the second training of the U18 Boys' Basketball.
Because there is usually a teachers' meeting on Monday, we don't have any teachers coaching us so I am in charge of the training.
The training time is from 3:30pm to 5:00pm. Within this 1 hour 30 minutes, we start from warming such as a simple lay-up drill and then to a little more intense drill such as 3-man weaves and then we move on to the game.
I am planning to have more game based training since we only have training once a week. We don't have time to work on our fitness so we will have to do it by our own at home.

Hopefully this team will be a good team this year since it is my last year, we will be having some friendly matches against other schools and also hopefully will be participating in a competition.

Heritage Walk

We participate on the Heritage Walk in George Town on 11th October 2009. The main purpose of this event is to view the beautiful historical buildings of Malaysia while walking through the course. The course was set on the road that have many heritage buildings. And as we walk, we raise funds for the MRC Penang Branch's many humanitarian projects.
We walked for about an hour and a bit viewing the heritage sights and then back to the original place where we were in the beginning for the lucky draw event.

I felt that we need to work hard on keeping those heritage buildings. Nowadays, industrialization and modernization have been taking place and I assume that many of these valuable historical buildings have been lost due to the land issues. We have to respect and learn about those heritage building and keep them in our town.

U18 Football Friendly Match

There was a friendly football game against the Dalat International School.
I am in the B team of the U18 Boys' football. I am the captain in the B team and I had to lead everyone.
The game ended with a score 4 - 1 to Dalat, but the worse thing is that I couldn't do much as a captain. I was supposed to be coaching and advising my teammates during the game but I couldn't really do much of that. The score doesn't really matter since it's just a friendly match, but since it is a friendly match there must be something to learn from it. And what I've learned today is that I am not good enough as a captain yet. I need to improve more, both in football techniques and leading the team.

Turtle Releasing

On June the 4th, the Uplands Environmental Society and few other people went to Rasa Sayang Hotel to join the "Save the Turtle" event. Basically what we did was to build a turtle sand sculpture and had a competition with the rest of the participants and after that we released small turtles into the sea. We had fun and also did something that is related to the global environmental issue.

U18 Basketball Dalat Tournament

We had a basketball tournament on the 15th and the 16th of May 2009. There were 8 teams together and we played games over the 2 days for the championship.
Our team was playing very well and we made ourselves to the finals. But unfortunately, we lost on the finals by 3 points and we came in second.
Although we came in second, I think it was a good experience for both myself and the team. Most of the players will be staying for next school year so we can reflect what we are weak in and work hard towards our next tournament. Thank you to Ms. Ross, who is our team coach and leaving at the end of this year, we will work even harder than we have done so far and improve our team.

Car Boot Sale

We had a Car Boot Sale on the 6th of June. We Year 12 students organized a bike riding event combined with the PTA's Car Boot Sale. We had some food stalls, games and some performances. Our aim was to raise fund for our up coming CAS trip to Kuching. I was in charge of the performances and was also helping out the Japanese food stall.
I had to make sure who are performing on the day and what time, and had to make a schedule for the performances. We also raised few money from the performances by putting a hat in front of the performers.
In the Japanese food stall, I was helping to cook Takoyaki, one of the Japanese traditional food and also to sell them.

I think it was quite successful since we raised some money from the performances, which I wasn't expecting and we sold quite a lot of our Takoyaki and raised lots of money from it.

Chamber Orchestra 9 (24/3/09)

We learned about Beethoven's 9 symphonies in orchestra. We listened to the most famous phrase in each symphony and watched the orchestra playing in youtube.

Badminton (22/3/09)

Few people are having badminton lesson every Sunday morning from 8:00 to 10:00 at YMCA. We usually play against each other, singles and doubles. We sometimes play against the other local students that the coach teaches. We usually play games but sometimes the coach teaches one of us individually.

Relay for Life (14/3/09)

There was an event "Relay for Life", a charity walk for cancer patients. It was at Youth Park, from 6pm until 10am in the next morning. We also did fund raising before the event to donate more money. We did leg waxing in school. Overall, we raised about RM1,200.
On the night, we were walking mostly the whole night, taking turns in the team. At least 2 people from the team have to be walking all the time. I walked for the whole night without any rest despite the time having dinner/breakfast or music performance. Me and my band performed 3 songs on the night.
I hope that our walk helped the cancer patients.

Chamber Orchestra 8(10/3/09)

We worked on one song only today. We recorded our "Kaiser Waltz". The recording itself actually went quite well but I think we will have to record it again for few mistakes.
Our performance is coming up on next Monday. Hope it will go well.

UES 5

Today we split up into groups and did our own works. I was in the "clothes recycling" group. What we do is that we ask people to bring in some old clothes and we design and make a new clothes from them. We will charge RM10 for it.
I was in this group today but I am not very sure whether I will be remain in this group from next week onwards. I will have to think about it over the mid-term holidays.

Chamber Orchestra 7 (10/2/09)

We were told about our performance date and which pieces to perform. We will be performing on the 16th of March which is Ria the school cultural celebration, and also in the up coming schools assembly, which is also in March. We are going to play the two new songs that we recently started practicing and also "Air on the G string" which we were practicing last term but did not get to perform.

U18 Basketball Tournament at ISKL (7/2/09)

We had a basketball tournament hosted by ISKL on the 7th of February 2009. Our team was just established and we did not have much practices together but we did quite well in this tournament. I was the point guard for all the games who has to conduct and control the team by calling the plays and so on. Since we did not have much practices, it was quite tough to get all the plays done perfectly in the game.
We finally came in third out of 6 teams. This tournament was the first game that actually took control of the whole team and I found it a bit difficult to do it. I still need to improve my techniques and also need to gain more knowledge about basketball plays.

Respect week workshop

We had respect week from 19th January to 23rd January. And few of us year 12 students had a workshop to teach about friendship and respecting differences to the years 6, 7, 8 and 9. I had classes with two year 7 classes and one year 9 class. We talked about friendship for year 7 and respecting difference for year 9. The year 7 class was difficult because we had the wrong information so we had to plan the lesson in about 3 minutes. But we somehow could organized the class by telling jokes and not making the lesson silent. For year 9, the lesson went pretty good. Everyone was responding well and they did the tasks that we gave properly.
This was my first time to give lessons in English language so i was quite nervous but I am really glad that it went well without any problems. I think I gained some confidence in this.

Chamber Orchestra 6 (13/1/09)

It was the first orchestra practice in term 2. We started off with 2 new songs, "Kaiser Waltz" and "When the going gets tough". This time I am completely a drummer, I will be playing the drums for both pieces. This will be good for me because I can improve my drums skill and the drums part for "When the going gets tough" is actually quite difficult.

Shoe boxing (15/12/08)

We had been working for this "Shoe boxing" project since the first of December. We collected used stuffs such as clothes, toys and books as a Christmas present for the orphans in the orphanage at Butterworth. We were collecting them every morning, break and lunch. All the presents that we collected were packed in shoe boxes and wrapped with a Christmas designed wrapping paper. We went to the orphanage on the 15th of December and had a little Christmas party with the orphans and gave the presents to them.
I hope that they realise that many people from outside actually care about them and therefore they have lots of donations. I was really happy to see the orphans smiling and being happy about the presents. This project should be continued every year by the Uplands community.