Visit I: Springvale Primary School & English Language Centre

The first school visit.

And what a visit it was.

The school has a mixture of multiple cultural backgrounds, including Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, Sudanese, Pacific Islanders and Burmese. Some of those students are actually refugees - victims of war and disaster.

Upon our arrival, we were broken up into groups and sent to different classrooms to observe classes of different years. My group and I visited 2 classes, one comprised 10 students, all of whom were 5 to 6 years old, while the other consisted of 7 students who were around 10 - 11 years old.



The atmosphere is very much different from Hong Kong. To begin with, the number of pupils is very small when compared to the 35 - 40 students Hong Kong classrooms typically hold. Because of this, the teacher is able to pay more attention to each of the students and know more about each individual. In the younger class, as we were observing the children work, she would tell us about a certain student's character every now and then.



In addition, unlike the popular chalk 'n' talk approach adopted by many teachers in Hong Kong, the teachers there liked to use activity-based learning and elicit responses from the students instead. For example, for the younger class, the teacher let her students do hands-on activities like coloring and matching to learn the letter 'b' and some letters which start with the letter. For the older class, the teacher only asked questions and elicited responses from her students; further guiding questions were asked if needed. The teacher also let students use building blocks to learn about fractions.

I believe making use of activities to help students learn is a much better method than lecturing them. This prevents students from losing attention easily and allows them to learn through hands-on experience, helping them to put what they have learnt into their long term memory.



In the Hong Kong context, it is difficult to implement activity-based learning to a large extent because of the often packed syllabus. Therefore, a possible change would be to have a little bit of lecturing at the beginning of a lesson to present the background knowledge needed to carry out subsequent activities.



Seeing how harsh the background of most of the kids at the school is, I can truly understand how lucky and spoilt many of the students (including myself) in Hong Kong are. We should really cherish our opportunities to learn and be educated.