Online Teaching Ideas And Resources During COVID-19 School Closures

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Ideas for e-learning during the Coronavirus school closures

This blog post is designed to offer ideas and support to any person who may be struggling with the current changes to education brought on by the spread of COVID-19. The school I work at in Beijing has remained closed since the end of January. Therefore, I have adapted the way I teach and helped to create a digital learning programme. While the tips and resources in this post might not be useful for all students, I hope that this post could offer help to teachers who are new to e-learning, or assist parents who are now the main educators for their children in many situations. The ideas and resources shown within this post have been used for a Year 6 mixed ability group, but could be adapted for different age levels or abilities. I will update this page with new ideas as time passes, so feel free to check back in the future. If you are wanting more information about how to set up an e-learning programme, please check out my post here.

General structure of digital learning lessons

Our school has been providing live lessons on Zoom in which our students can attend half hour sessions. Our lessons generally comprise of a mixture of teacher-talk, discussions with the students (sharing responses/ideas in the chat box or speaking on microphone) and multimedia (such as videos, images or audio files). We have found that having a short break with an educational video takes the “lecture” feeling away from our sessions. Our school has a subscription to Brainpop (they do also offer some free resources without subscription), Twinkl, and Britannica for Kids. YouTube (despite being banned in China) also provides some useful short videos which supplement our lesson content.

The lessons usually have the following structure:

Welcome – check in with the students to see how they are feeling and discuss the Learning Objective of the session.

WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like) – review the previous session/talk about examples of work that were good.

Warm-up: A task to focus the students on the subject area or content.

Learning: The main focus of the lesson, usually including a video or other multimedia file, questions for the students to answer and a discussion time.

Independent task: this is introduced towards the end of the session and is based on the content of the lesson. These tasks are talked through and shared with the students as a pdf. We include examples of what we would expect for each task and add extra ‘challenges’ for those students that want to be extended.

Below I have provided some ideas, examples and suggestions of activities, lessons or project work for English, Math, Science, Geography and History, Music and P.E. 

English

Short Story Writing Unit (approximately 3 weeks)

As a Year Six team, we felt that our students could benefit from revisiting a story writing unit. Students already have experience of narratives, so we believed that covering content that is familiar could be comforting to the students during a strange time. We of course changed the parameters, focus and expectations of what the students should be including in their writing so that they would be building on their existing knowledge and understanding. This unit can be adapted for younger or older students and more/less time could be given depending on the ability and age of the students.

During our English lesson warm-ups, we generally give students a discussion task or an activity to make them think and focus on English (generally a SPaG activity). The following website offers a large number of editing tasks (students must identify and change errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar) which we spend around 3 minutes on: https://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/archives/edit.shtml

Week 1

During the first week of our story writing unit, we spent time discussing the purpose of storytelling and how it has changed over the years (from cave paintings, to sharing stories verbally, plays, radio shows, movies and television programmes and now to the internet and video sharing sites such as YouTube). We explored examples of different genres of narratives and spent time talking about favourite stories. Next, we looked at examples of short stories that many of the students were familiar with. We covered a range of skills such as retelling/summarising a story, identifying the various parts of the plot and placing them on a story mountain and brainstorming alternative dilemmas/resolutions to stories.

Here are useful videos to remind students on how to summarise stories and the main elements of a story:

Summarising a story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsB73dRuGcE

Story mountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpWHZJZQDSE

The YouTube channel ‘Cool School’ has some short funny videos that are appealing to primary school students (even though the content is mostly fairy tales, the humour and animations were engaging for our Year 6 students) and were useful to show quick examples of how stories are structured.

The Princess and the pea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRIQaGCXdZY

Mulan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5HTGdGEHEg

The Three Billy Goats Gruff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTOkbABj3RU

We later spent time as a class creating a rubric/checklist of what we thought were important features in a short story.

Week 2

In the second week, we wanted students to begin brainstorming and planning for their own story. There are many examples online of story mountain templates that you can use for your students.

The following videos were useful materials.

What is an imaginative narrative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ3RwPeerOg

Brainstorming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJULQ0xBHFs

Planning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAVW3b7E0TI

Writing a beginning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJaOISwPjAc

Writing a middle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhm3tK41uWQ

Writing an ending:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvg7CcaPJSs

We have also included sessions on how to edit and revise the work we have done. Rather than leaving all of the editing until the end, we placed some editing sessions during the story writing process.

How to edit/revise texts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T6PmQQlKss

Examples of story writing/writing process:

A humorous video which outlines the elements of a story plot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no4fT-sdqNI

A series of videos that outline parts of the story mountain and include emphasis on descriptions of characters and setting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5pqeHpQnHc

Week 3

In the final week of our unit, students continued to write their stories and spent time during the lessons sharing their work. I have been giving the students the option of what or how much they share:

§  Reading part of what they have written.

§  Discussing an edit or ‘up-leveling’ change they have made to their work.

§  Explaining what they plan to write ext.

Once the students have finished the writing, they will self-assess using the rubric we created. Next, students will share their work with peers. We will spend time discussing how to give helpful and useful feedback before asking students to read other stories and share their advice and thoughts. Posting the finished stories to a platform such as Microsoft Teams or Seesaw will be a celebration of the story writing and will help to maintain the sense of community and pride in their work.

Reading Challenges (ongoing)

We want students to feel encouraged to continue reading during this time. While websites such as Raz Kids and Read Theory provide a good platform where students can be assigned leveled books which match their ability, we are also aware that we want students to have time away from devices. So, we have encouraged students to consider using physical books for reading challenges (this has not always been possible due to the location and restrictions of some students).

The idea of the reading challenge is for students to feel enthusiastic and engage in what they have read.

The students can be reading various books during this time; however, we want them to select one book which they have enjoyed. Then, the students will have the choice of an activity (or a number of activities) which can show their understanding and comprehension of the content and allows them to express their ideas or creativity.

Below is a list of post-reading activities we have suggested to our students.

Mathematics

Show what you know (a stand-alone activity which could be repeated for various content)

A good open-ended activity in which students can work at their own level, is to assign students a ‘knowledge harvest’ activity. This is when you select a mathematical topic (for example, fractions) and ask students to show all of the facts they know about this topic on a poster. This activity is good for students as it makes them think critically about what they already know and can challenge the students to think about all of the facts they know about that topic.

Below is an example:

This knowledge harvest idea can be used in other subject areas. You can scaffold the activity by including sentence/fact starters (like the example above: how to find fractions of an amount...) or you can keep it completely open-ended and just give them a topic in which they will need to show what they know.

Shape books (project work 1-2 weeks)

Another activity that students could complete is a project where students will create a resource on geometry (shapes, lines and angles). Our students have done this before during school time, but it could also be done as a home-schooling activity. Our students were given the task to create a bilingual (English and Chinese) educational resource which would teach other primary school students about 2D and 3D shapes, different types of line and angles. Students could choose to make a physical book, comic, video or other digital resource. The books and resources that we created were then shared and sent to schools in other locations within China. Having a purpose and an audience for this project really motivated our students and if this was completed during time away from school, their work could still be shared online or printed once normal routine is resumed.

Science

Our students continue to be in many different locations. Some were on holiday when the issues surrounding the virus became more serious and therefore some children did not have access to many materials or resources. There are still however, some activities that you could try to assign your students. Here is a suggestion:

States of matter

We asked our students to create a resource (PowerPoint, poster, video etc.) which would show their understanding of the states of matter. We also asked our students to include demonstrations of reversible and irreversible changes.

The students were quite excited at having the opportunity to do practical activities.

Some of the demonstrations our students included frying an egg (irreversible change) or mixing vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. As part of the demonstration, the students had to be explaining the science behind what was happening using the correct vocabulary. We shared the following links with students so that they could get some ideas if they were struggling:

https://lifestyle.howstuffworks.com/crafts/science-projects/science-projects-for-kids-states-of-matter.htm

https://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/categories/experiments/states-of-matter/

History/geography

Global citizens/people who changed the world

Project work has been quite successful for us, as students are able to dip in and out of the work at times which are convenient for them, there is an element of choice for the students and it is differentiated by outcome.

A project which we have completed is looking at people who have made a positive difference to the world/global citizens.

First, we discussed what we thought a global citizen was. Next, we looked at some videos showing examples of people who have made a positive impact.

Malala Yousafzai:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48pFoAObv_w

Michelle Obama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F88YYnw6lsE

Mohandas Gandhi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWhCniD9VkI
Greta Thunberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzLuAHLR53A

After watching the videos, we discussed what skills and attributes those people had displayed.

Finally, we gave the students the choice to choose one of the people we had learned about or selecting a different person to research in more detail. The students were given a planning sheet to do research, before using that information to create a fact-file or biography on that person. A geography link to this could be for students to focus on people who made a positive impact to a particular place or location. What was that place like before and how has it changed? Students could delve into the culture and geographical features of that place and later share their findings.

Physical education

It is important for our students to remain active. Some students may be able to go outside and maintain a relatively normal routine. Others have access to parks or gardens. When my school first closed, some of my students were unable to leave their apartments for a number of weeks. Therefore, we tried to offer our students some ways to keep active. The P.E teacher at our school has been posting videos each week with some exercise routines for student to follow and try at home.

If this is not possible, there are a number of exercise/fun activity videos available on YouTube or other websites which students can use. Searching for ‘just dance’ videos provides many different options for students to copy the dance moves to some of their favourite songs.

Students could also create their own obstacle course or design their own active game. For example, you could inflate a plastic bag and try to keep it from falling on the floor by hitting the bag or doing kick-ups. Students can then share their obstacle course ideas or games on platforms such as Seesaw or Teams for their peers to try.

Music

Some students may be lucky to have musical instruments to play with. Others may have access to different genres of music. Ask the students to listen to various genres and share their opinions of each style, with a comment on the rhythm, tone, melody and any instruments they can identify.

Another activity for students to complete is a game which I think could be described as an audio version of charades.

First ask students to brainstorm the sounds they might hear around their home during the morning/afternoon/evening. Some examples they might say are snoring, brushing teeth, buttering toast, closing doors, walking up/down stairs etc.

Using household objects, their voice or body parts (clapping hands, stomping feet etc.) students will need to reenact a sound(s) that they might hear as part of a daily routine.

Can others guess what sound they are trying to represent? This game could be played as a family, or students could record their different sounds and share them on platforms like Teams for their classmates to guess.

Allowing time for interaction and collaboration for some tasks creates a sense of community which is lacking for some students as we adhere to social distancing/isolation/quarantine.


I hope that you have found something useful in this blog post. If you have any other suggestions or resources, please get in touch and we can try to create a bank of e-learning ideas. Take care everyone!

Creating A Digital Learning Programme During COVID-19

Teaching from home
As a teacher of over ten years, I have at times dreamed of being able to work from home and deliver lessons using Skype. On those cold, dark, wintry morning, I have wished that I could just stay on my sofa. Be careful what you wish for!

Since the Lunar New Year holiday at the end of January 2020, my school has remained closed due to the spread of the Coronavirus within Mainland China. Many educational establishments have created a range of e-learning experiences for their students.

The aim of this post is to share the experiences that I (as a Year 6 primary school teacher) have had and make some comments on the pros and cons of the activities we have crafted as a school. I will also include some information on how students have been affected by long periods of being away from their normal routine (and in some cases, prolonged isolation).

Creating an e-learning programme
It is important to discuss this with your team or leaders and gain clarity on how you will have a consistent approach to e-learning.

Here are some considerations:

How will you deliver tasks to students?

Written tasks
During the beginning of our school closure, while we started to formulate an e-learning programme, we were posting activities and tasks for our students to do on platforms such as Seesaw or Teams. We gave students differentiated work to complete and included examples so that they were supported as much as possible while working mostly independently. Our students could contact us if they needed help, however it became clear that they were missing contact with teachers and their friends.

Recorded lessons
Our school tried recorded lessons that students could access and watch at a convenient time. This was useful due to having international students in many different locations and times zones. Creating and editing videos was certainly time consuming. In addition, this method of sharing lessons does not provide a lot of interaction for students.

Live lessons
Our school uses Zoom or Teams to deliver live lessons for our students. This offers students the opportunity to interact and discuss topics and content with their teacher or peers. We have also been recording the live lessons and uploading them to the cloud (Microsoft One Drive works best for us since Google Drive is difficult to access in China) so that students who are unable to attend live sessions may view it at a later time. We are currently holding live sessions for English, Maths, Social Studies and Chinese. Activities and recorded sessions for specialist classes such as P.E, Music and Art are uploaded to the cloud for students to access at a time of their choosing.

Timetable
Once you have decided on your preferred method of delivering lessons or tasks, it is important to create a daily/weekly schedule that will be shared with your students. More than ever, our students have been craving routine and this will help them to gain a sense of normality during these unpredictable times.
The timetable includes the time of live sessions and suggested time slots of when they could be having breaks, completing other lesson content or extra curricular activities.

Lesson content
In primary school, we have established that we will not be covering new content (at least for now). Reviewing skills and revisiting learning that students have already covered since the beginning of the school year (but in new/adapted ways) offers students something familiar and builds on their existing knowledge and understanding. For example, in Year 6, we have looked at creating an imaginative narrative. The students have already covered the features of short story writing before, however we can see that it has been beneficial for the students to do this again and they have appreciated the chance to express their creativity.

Submitting work/non-contact time communication
It is important for students to know how and when (acceptable hours) they can contact their teachers. Each week, we share the weekly timetable with our students and include links and passwords for students to access live sessions. We also remind them of how they can contact their teacher and our preferred methods of sharing their completed work. Our students have been submitting their work to us via Seesaw, Teams or email. In Year 6, we have been using Microsoft OneNote which is a useful tool in storing student work all in one organised space.

Child protection
You may need to talk with your leader(s) about any changes to your establishment's child protection policy.

Delivering your e-learning programme

Setting norms
For the first week (at least one week), it is important to establish a set of understandings of how you are going to be running the digital learning experience. We spent much of the first week allowing our students to become familiar with the different apps and online resources. During our live sessions, we spent time checking in on the students and giving them time to share their feelings. We also provided them with suggestions of what to do if they were feeling stressed or bored. It has also been important to set up a list of agreements on how we expect students to participate during live sessions and how we can decide who will be speaking or sharing. Scheduling in circle time style sessions was really important. In Year 6, when we hold live classes on Zoom, we generally ask students to mute their microphones and type responses or questions in a chat box. Students can also digitally 'raise their hand' and can un-mute their microphone if they wish to share something verbally.

Sharing content with students
Zoom has mostly been a very useful tool to hold live lessons. It allows the host of the lesson to share their screen with the viewers. When this happens, I have generally been playing a custom-made PowerPoint with a mixture of text, images, videos, examples of work and an explanation of an independent task that students should attempt once the session is over. The independent task is saved as a pdf and shared with the students on Seesaw. Seesaw cannot host files as large as the recorded lessons, and Seesaw did begin to feel cluttered with many different posts and files, so this is why we took the decision to also upload files to the One Drive.

Screen time concerns
Since my school has been creating and delivering digital content for seven weeks, we have noticed that some students and teachers have complained of headaches and feeling tired. We have tried to create independent tasks (following the live online sessions) that will not rely on devices or technology. Wherever possible, we have tried to design activities that students can do on paper or without the use of electronics.

Supporting students
Personally, I have found it helpful to provide some allotted time at the beginning or end of the live lessons for students to talk to each other and discuss their feelings. Sometimes the students just want to talk about something they have done, a piece of news they have heard, or to show their pet on the camera. Students have at times expressed feelings of loneliness or boredom. Some of my students are in locations where they are rarely able to go outside. I shared with them a list of activities to promote self-care, which they could try while at home:

A handwritten diary - taking time to think about your feelings is important. Writing a diary will help you to practice your language skills, but you will also be working through your emotions and creating an interesting document to revisit in the future.

A passion project - perhaps there is a certain topic that you are interested in. You could research it using books, digital resources or having discussions with friends or family members. This project could include you building a model or replica of an animal, building or invention. Share your research project with your peers so that they could learn from your findings.

Working on a hobby - listen to or play music, draw or paint, knit or make something out of clay! Doing something practical or creative could help you relax or build on your skills.

Get in the kitchen - design and make a healthy meal. Share it with your classmates so that they can try your menu!

Keeping active - use videos such as Just Dance or create your own routines that will act as good exercise. You could even invent your own P.E game for others to try out.

Further ideas
If you have any questions please get in touch. If you would like to look at some examples of the resources, projects and lessons that my school has delivered during this time, please get see my blog post here. If you have some ideas for me, I am more than happy to listen. It's important to help each other during this time. I hope to post again with some examples of activities/templates that will helpfully be useful to other educators who may be in a similar situation. Take care everyone!

Banned In China - Deactivating My Facebook Account

The Great Firewall Of China. I used to think that was a clever and funny way of describing the internet censorship in China. But since coming to Beijing in August 2012, I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to enjoy the kind of internet freedom which is taken for granted back in the U.K.

This includes time taken to research a trustworthy method of connecting to foreign websites, attempting to purchase software when many of the websites selling it are blocked, and the time spent trying to use the software while the connection often fails.

When I first arrived in China, I found free software for my computer. This allowed me an intermittent connection to blocked and restricted websites such as Facebook. But the connection speed was far too unreliable to stream videos on Youtube.

After talking to colleagues, I decided to purchase a Virtual Private Network which can add security to the internet connection and also re-routes the internet connection through a foreign server, allowing access to banned websites and offering me a faster speed to watch videos. However, even a VPN cannot ensure a good connection. Earlier this year, my paid subscription to a VPN provider stopped working and could not grant me access to restricted webpages. This was highly frustrating as I keep in touch with many friends and family through Facebook and this blog.

As my subscription for the VPN came up for renewal, I decided that I would not pay for a service I could not depend on; instead I would rely solely on free VPN software I had downloaded to my phone. Although this would not always work efficiently, it did usually allow me enough time to communicate with friends and family. This is one of the reasons I have not updated my blog in such a long time. Using my phone to make blog posts can be rather laborious, particularly when the aforementioned free VPN software fails.

Recently, I heard from friends that VPNs are working more consistently again. This of course can change if there is a sudden government crackdown on internet activity. But for now, I have made the decision to renew my VPN subscription, which offers me a less stressful internet experience. With that being said, last Sunday I chose to deactivate my Facebook account, and here is why:

I have read online articles explaining the theory that using mobile phones or digital devices before sleeping, can affect our sleeping patterns and quality of sleep. While feeling stressed with events at work, I thought that I could experiment with cutting down on my phone usage before bedtime. When I thought more carefully about this, I realised I did generally use my phone just before I slept, to check Facebook and other apps.

I also read similar articles which detailed that social media can affect our moods. Viewing Facebook is like seeing the “best bits” of people’s lives and it can result in making unfair comparisons with one's own life. While I did not feel like I was making such negative judgements about myself, I did realise that I could drastically cut down on the time I spent trying to connect to Facebook and browsing on social media. Living abroad can definitely give me the feeling of being “out of the loop” but I definitely thought that I could benefit from cutting out the temptation of using Facebook for a while. Instead of looking for gossip fodder, I could read more books, study Chinese or sleep that little bit earlier.

So how did the week go? On the first day of deactivating my account, my thumbs did automatically click on the Facebook app to check if it was someone’s birthday, or if there was some interesting news or rant that had been posted. But it was surprising how quickly I stopped wanting to check. I usually use Facebook Messenger to speak with my friends and family so I did notice that absence. However I was observing that I slept much earlier in the evening than before. Moreover, whether or not it was my mind playing tricks on me, I’m not quite sure, but it appeared that I was having a deeper sleep each night.

During the week, I did of course use other forms of social media such as the Chinese juggernaut Wechat (see my previous post on the joys of Wechat here), so I hadn’t completely cut out communication with others. But now that I will be reactivating my Facebook account, I will try to be more aware of how I am spending my free time. Internet freedom may not be something I can relish while living in China, but I can choose to accept it (be that reluctantly). What if my VPN doesn’t connect? I don’t have to get annoyed and keep trying until the early hours of the morning. I can rest and see if it works the next day. After all, most things are better after a good night’s sleep, right? 

My Gap Year

On February 12 2006, I nervously got off an aeroplane and was immediately struck by a humidity and hullabaloo which I had previously never encountered. It has now been ten years to the day that I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City for a week of TEFL training, followed by five months of teaching English in Hanoi, Vietnam. It was to be the start of my Gap Year and most definitely one of the biggest life-changing decisions I have made so far, in terms of becoming who I am and where I am today.

During TEFL training in HCMC

Since then, I have read some negative articles about Gap Years. These opinions are generally based around the belief that Gap Years are funded by wealthy parents who send their children away for a year to “discover themselves” while lazing on tropical beaches. But Gap Years should not be synonymous with teenagers who rely on the Bank Of Mum And Dad to fund drunken binges with other backpackers and getting tattoos or dreadlocks.

Of course, I did drink alcohol during my Gap Year and I did enjoy relaxing on beautiful beaches with powdery soft sand and crystal clear seawater. However, these experiences were paid for by myself and are additional memories to what I would consider a significant life event. I wouldn’t say that I “found myself” on my Gap Year, but it certainly equipped me with some of the life skills required to become more adventurous, self-aware and self-confident. This in turn, resulted in me liking myself a whole lot more.

Some people say that school years are the best of your life, but as a painfully shy teenager who struggled to choose a career path, I found it very difficult to be either outgoing or studious. Disillusioned with my own education and future profession, I decided that I would spend some time travelling. But I didn’t want to just travel to some far-flung location for a few weeks and then move on to a new place. I wanted to get to really know a new country, language and culture.

Luckily, I had heard of an organisation that offered young people the opportunity to do volunteer work in a number of different countries. Latitude Global Volunteering (formerly Gap Activity Projects) offers people the chance to give something back to the community they are visiting, meanwhile meeting new people and beginning to understand the culture and traditions of their Gap Year home. Furthermore, it was a relief to know that I had the support of an organisation, who would help me in the event of any troubles that may arise when living in a new (and initially daunting) country. I was in Vietnam from February to August, so technically it was more of a Gap-Half-Year, but in those six months I had so many enriching experiences.

Having a Gap Year to fund, not only taught me the basics of budgeting, it also gave me something to plan for. As a nineteen year old who was unsure of what I wanted to be in the future, becoming a volunteer English teacher gave me aspirations and a purpose that had long eluded me during my Secondary School education.

It also made me step outside of my comfort zone. For too long I had suffered from social anxiety and worried about meeting new people. I would become stressed about whether or not others would care about the things I wanted to say and therefore became awkwardly silent. Living and working abroad required me to communicate and put me in situations where I had to socialise and make myself heard. I began to see that some people did like listening to me. Moreover, I became unperturbed by people who were indifferent towards me.

My time in Hanoi was special for a number of reasons. I formed a good circle of friends – both fellow volunteers and locals from the capital city of Vietnam. The diversity of the food, landscape and people resulted in me falling in love with Vietnam; which I have written about in a previous blog post here. At the time of writing this blog post, I have been to Vietnam a total of five times. I have learned a few Vietnamese karaoke songs, attended a traditional Vietnamese wedding and gained a beautiful Vietnamese Goddaughter. I will of course return again in the future.

Nhung, Hung and I in 2007

Hung and Chung's wedding, 2009

Tam Dao, 2014

My Goddaughter, Quynh in July 2014

With former student and now friend Quy, July 2014

My time spent teaching high school students in Hanoi confirmed my love of teaching and set me on the path of university in order to become a Primary School teacher. I do cringe when I think back to my pre-teacher training English language lessons in a crowded Hanoi classroom, but it really did cement my enjoyment of helping others. Additionally, the frequent language barrier involved in teaching English to Vietnamese speakers forced me to become more patient.

Finally, my enjoyment of learning so much about a new country and being welcomed into a new community, has undoubtedly contributed to my decision to be a primary school teacher in Beijing, China. My Gap Year gave me the confidence to know that I can communicate, make decisions and be happy in a completely different place to what I am accustomed to. The challenges of being in a foreign place make me a stronger person and for now, the benefits of living abroad far outweigh the negatives. 

My Gap Year affected me in such a positive way that I regularly think about all of the fun activities and events that unfurled in 2006. There are too many friends and fond thoughts to include in this one post. People who regard all Gap Years as unproductive and solely for “lazy rich kids” really irritate me. I would highly recommend a similar “Constructive Gap Year” to anybody who is fortunate and able to spend the time and money on doing so. Whether or not you have hopes for your own prospects, a Gap Year will certainly give you the most wonderful memories of the past and a set of skills that will help you in the future.