Name: Zaher Bin Wahab

From: Singapore

How long have you been collecting? 3 years

How many pins do you own? 184

As you might remember, the inaugural Summer Youth Olympic Games (YOG) was held in Singapore in August 2010. Here is a pin project that I did with the student in my school.

My name is Zaher and I am a Primary School teacher from Singapore and this is my favourite Pin story...

In August 2009, after volunteering at the 1st Asian Youth Games (which was a test event for the YOG), I initiated a small project which I named the "Countdown to the 1st Youth Olympic Games" Pin Project with my form class - Primary 3 Gabriel.

What does this project entail you might wonder?

Well, basically I wanted to allow my nine year olds to have the opportunity to do several things during the 1 year countdown period to the inaugural Youth Olympic Games. (Note: We started this project in August 2009 - exactly 1 year before the YOG in 2010)

1) I wanted them to be immersed in the Olympic spirit and be at one with the Olympic values of friendship, excellence and respect.
2) I wanted them to recognise (or at least know the locations of) the 205 National Olympic Committees (NOCs) that would be participating in the Youth Olympic Games.

So what did I do?
With help from Mr Chris Chan (Secretary General of the Singapore National Olympic Committee), I managed to get the addresses of all 205 NOCs of the world.

What began in my 1 English class soon spread to the whole school! In total, 205 students from the whole school participated.

Each participant wrote a letter to one of the 205 NOCs to request for a generic NOC pin.

To help them, I set aside time during my English lessons (and sometimes after school) to teach the participants, the fundamentals of persuasive letter writing and after many drafts, they had written their very first formal letter.

I then collated all the handwritten letters and sent them to the NOCs. In total, during the countdown period, 184 NOCs responded to this project, some from as far as Zimbabwe and Seychelles!

Although we did not manage to meet our target of all the 205 NOCs, the students learnt:
1) to write a formal, persuasive letter
2) a bit of Geography - in order to participate in this pin project, the students had to show me that they knew what country they were writing to, hence they had to do some research and show it to me.

I am a pin collector myself and I have had many exciting moments trading pins but nothing beats seeing the joy on a student's face on the day a reply (and a pin!) comes back!

Many of my students said they truly enjoyed the experience and they definitely learnt many interesting things about the country they wrote to. In fact, I got some of them to share with the rest of the school during morning assembly.

This map now takes pride of place in our school library and that it why this is my favourite pin story.