Ruud Gullit Visits WAB

Sisi_Chen — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 04:00:00 +0000

Ruud Gullit, Dutch soccer manager and former professional player, visited the Western Academy of Beijing on June 10 to run soccer clinics with lucky WAB students and two local Chinese soccer schools. The former Dutch national team captain and ‘87 and ‘89 World Soccer Player of the Year star worked directly with the lucky young players, running drills to work on coordination and gameplay.

Having played multiple positions during his successful career, Gullit became famous around the world for his skills on the field, and instantly recognizable dreadlocks. Now with short hair, but an equally infectious smile, Gullit was in Beijing preparing for the friendly international match between the Dutch football team and the Chinese National team. Gullit also participated in several events leading up to the match, and was kind enough to come to WAB to make the morning clinic part of his itinerary.

“The Embassy is excited to have the Dutch national team visiting China,” said Reinier Koppelaar, Counsellor for Health, Welfare and Sports from the Netherlands Embassy in Beijing. “The players are extremely popular here, and their presence will boost attention for our country. Therefore we organized several events around the match, giving Chinese people the opportunity to learn more about The Netherlands. I am also delighted to see Chinese children play soccer together with Dutch as well as other international kids here at WAB this morning.”

Everybody on the field for the two hours of clinics was having fun, including the WAB coaches and teachers. High school teacher and soccer coach Mike Lakwijk, who worked with the Dutch Embassy to bring this event to WAB, was clearly included in that group, taking a moment to sign a ball for a student from one of the local schools. When asked about what he thought of the students and the experience on that beautiful Monday morning, Mr. Gullit said he was happy to see the kids out on the pitch, and that seeing them have fun was what it is all about.

Caleb Liu, WAB’s Assistant Athletics and Activities Director, who was on hand for the clinics, expressed his appreciation of having Mr. Gullit come to the school to work with WAB students. Liu noted the significance of having such a well-known star and great ambassador of the sport here at school working directly with students.

In Tuesday evening’s friendly match between the Dutch Orange Lions and the Chinese Red Dragons national teams, the FIFA world ranked number 9 Dutch team was victorious, defeating the host team 2-0 at Workers’ Stadium in Sanlitun.

This article was originally posted on the Western Academy of Beijing’s Lianxi website. It is reposted here with permission.

Photo courtesy of WAB

WAB Student Translators to Release 40-Book Set

On Tuesday, June 4, Western Academy of Beijing (WAB) Grade 4 and 5 students unveiled a new series of graded level Chinese language children’s books for non-native Chinese language learners – a series they translated from English. The stories are part of the Start Reading Chinese series, and include eight titles in each of five reading bands.

Tuesday’s launch built upon the successes of last year’s Grade 5 students. In last year’s efforts, Grade 5 students brought eight children’s books to the large Chinese audience. This time around, a total of 43 Grade 4 and 5 students combined efforts to translate forty books from English to Mandarin. These talented WAB students combined their language and teamwork skills, and translated the books using their own voices and styles of writing. This is important, remarks Wang Biao, deputy director of Beijing University Publishing House. Wang says that the editors took care to ensure quality in the translations, but were also careful to not interfere too much with the way the students chose to express the original meanings, emphasizing that it is important to have a natural voice in the language. Luckily, kids have that by default when writing kids books!

As the series describes, the Start Reading Chinese is a five-level graded reader for learners of Chinese adapted and translated from the English reader series Start Reading. It features fine illustrations by internationally renowned artists for children’s books, and tells well-loved Western children’s stories in relatively simple Chinese. The stories are easily relatable to Western children’s lives and, thanks to our young translators, they are told in humorous language. WAB’s Director, Geoffrey Andrews was a driving force behind this project, and was quick to point out that children like stories that they can relate to in real life. By making reading fun, Andrews notes, kids will develop a love of reading. To support young Chinese language learners in their learning, each book in the series contains carefully graded language with controlled vocabulary and sentence structures.

The leveled sets of books are color-coded in pink, red, yellow, blue and green and have titles “Just like you”, Outdoor fun”, “Let’s go on holiday” “Whatever the weather” “ Pip’s pet, “ Freddy’s Family,” “Carlo’s circus,” “Just Jack” and “Out and About.” Each set contains its own subset of stories, and includes a workbook and accompanying DVD. The “Out and About” series, entitled 校园内外(xiaoyuan neiwai) in Chinese, includes Sink or Swim, The Fun Race, Nature Detectives and Dogball.

The inscription on the series reads: Thank you to Geoffrey Andrews and Wang Wenjing of the Western Academy of Beijing and. Zhao Ma Bingru from ISB for the planning of this publication, and to the teachers and students of these two schools who have done a wonderful job to make it happen!

Congratulations to all those who helped to bring this project to life, especially our Grade 5 students! Special thanks go to WAB Elementary School Chinese Coordinator Linda Meng and her team for working on the project with our WAB students.

This post originally appeared as “Young WAB translators release 40 book set!” on WAB’s online newsletter, Lianxi.

Photos courtesy of WAB

Andrew Walton – Beijing Kids

Ruud Gullit Visits WAB

WAB Student Translators to Release 40-Book Set