Foreword: Clearly I’m over thinking this. I wanted to write weekly but it’s more like monthly now. I’ll go faster now, so pardon me if my writing is a little unorganized. 😝
English and Chinese in P1 nowadays
Over the last 2 Friday evenings, i attended the English and Chinese curriculum workshops at my kid’s school. Close to 200 parents turned up, so it looks like today’s parents are very involved in their children’s education. I never liked English and Chinese classes, and was very happy to be rid of them in the university. But today’s approach in school might make me feel differently about languages.
In this post I’ll highlight some of the interesting bits of language classes in school today.
Show and tell
Both languages have show and tell built-in. I don’t remember any of that in my primary school days. It was mostly sitting behind the desks, listening to the teacher or doing some writing. The school explained that the intention is to help the children build confidence in their use of the language and speaking in front of an audience. I think this is useful to have, and will certainly help them in the long run. There’s no short of presentations and public speaking in the workplace. And from my experience, people who speak up and are more visible at the workplace tend to have an edge over the quieter ones.
Conversational skills
These are kind of like the oral tests I used to have in school, but practised more frequently in class. Furthermore there’s a more structured approach to formulating a response. This is especially evident for Chinese, where students are expected to apply 六何法 (who, what, where, when, why, how) when describing the depicted scenes. In addition, students have to make judgements about actions shown in the pictures, saying whether the actions are right or wrong, and their reason for saying that. For the example below, a student is expected to say something like:
This is in front of the drinks stall in a school canteen during recess. There are some students queuing to buy drinks. At the end of the line, a male student is running and knocked into a female student and toppled her bowl of noodles. I think it is not right to run in the canteen as the male student is causing danger to himself as well as other people around him.
Online learning platforms
It’s a bit surprising that there’s 2 online learning platforms for Chinese and none for English, and the schools actually encourage the use of both.
Broadly, eZhishi has more activities and content, while Xuele is like an interactive version of the school textbook. I will do a more detailed review of both platforms in the future.
That’s it for now. Thanks for taking time to read this. Please leave comments below to tell me what you think, or if there’s anything you’d like me to write about. Until then… see you next time! 😁
