Watched TQ Tutorial
We read through the rules and watched the tutorial.
Brainstormed, researched, and decided our Topic
Our team noticed many students felt their parents annoying while lots of parents sighed when they talked about their kids. We surfed on the Internet, wrote articles about the relationship between our parents and us, talked to teachers, parents and students, to find out the main reason of this kind of bad relationship between parents and kids. Finally we found it out and decided on the problem of parents’ spending time communicating with their kids.
Title
We wanted our title to be special and catchy. We finally decided on Father And Mother, I Lack Your Time—FAMILY TIME.
Logo
We decided to make our logo by drawing. On our logo, there is a clock, which means time; there is a father, a mother and a little girl, which means a family.
Developed Project
We analyzed the issue of our project, and found out the problems we were to solve. Then we made our plan: to solve the first, second and third problems, we do questionnaire survey; to solve the fourth problem, we interview experts on Family education and parent-child relationship and adults whose parents haven’t spent enough time communicating with them when they were young; to solve the last problem, we adopt 9 activities to appeal to parents to spend more time communicating with their kids.
Questionnaires
It was really hard to make a good questionnaire, which we hadn’t expected. We spent nearly a month to work it out. We surfed on the Internet, read books, and asked experienced people to learn how to make a good questionnaire. Then we discussed, made the first draft, modified it for many times, and made the second draft. We showed the second draft to about ten persons who we thought could give us good suggestion of modification. They did. And we modified the draft again and finally had our first questionnaire. Once we made our first questionnaire, it was much easy to make the second one and the third one.
Questionnaire survey
Doing questionnaire survey is fun, but you should firstly have the courage of asking a favor of people who might drive you away or look at you oddly as if you were doing something shameful. We went to many different places and surveyed people in different jobs. All in all, we surveyed 484 fathers, 522 mothers and 564 kids.
Questionnaire analysis
Analyzing questionnaires is not easy. We spent 14 days to complete this task. We did classification and statistics. And we wrote reports.
Interviews
Thanks to our school leaders and our local hospital, we got to know some experts on family education and parent-child relationship and some adults whose parents haven’t spent enough time communicating with them when they were young. We choose four of them to interview.
9 activities to appeal to parents
1. At our school gate.
We designed a catchy poster and put it up at the school gate. We also designed a leaflet. After school, when there were lots of parents waiting for kids to pick them up and take them home, we propagated our poster and hand out our leaflets to them.
2. Out of our school.
Taking along our poster and our leaflets, we went to the parks, communities, shopping malls and the beach to propagate.
3&4. In our school
We asked the Chinese teachers of Grade 3, 4, 5 to help. The students were asked to write a letter to their parents. If they considered their parents had enough time communicating with them, they were to write a thank-you letter to their parents; if they considered their parents hadn’t enough time communicating with them, they were to write a letter to their parents, expressing their wish of parents’ spending more time with them.
We handed out our leaflets to these students, and asked them to take the leaflets to their parents.
5. Campus broadcasting station
We wrote an article for our project and asked broadcasters in our campus broadcasting station to broadcast it.
6. Campus TV
We designed a script and asked our campus TV to make TV programs for our project.
7. Campus website
We wrote another article for our project and our principal consented to put it on our campus website.
8. Local newspaper
We wrote the third article for our project and our local newspaper
Shekou News
published it.
9. Forum
A forum about parent-child relationship was held in our school, a lot of parents joined the activity. Ms. Wang, a famous expert on family, marriage and parent-child relationship in North America, talked about the importance of parents’ spending time with their kids.
There was a journalist who heard of our project and was very interested in our project. She called us and she is going to interview us and do special reports for our project. We are proud of what we had done, and we are going to continue doing our project. This project helped and can help a lot of people. It is very meaningful.
Results
We evaluated our project from viewing our survey to see how the students and parents felt about our project and if the parents had spent more time with their kids. We did our survey not only in the form of questionnaire, but also on the blog of our coach.
Submitted
We designed and wrote our pages in ThinkQuest. Our coach revises them and submitted the project.
