School-based curriculum

1. General English Programme
2. Approach
   • About 60% of the lesson time is allocated to developing students’ language skills and strategies in task-based learning lessons. 
3. Strategies
   • Enhance students’ learning efficiency by promoting various pre-task activities such as asking guided questions to tap into students’ prior knowledge, doing interviews, and searching for information online.
   • Stimulate thinking by studying various text types related to the theme and topic of each lesson.
   • Strengthen students’ writing abilities by referencing their vocabulary by reading High-Frequency words and sentences, doing mind mapping, promoting self-correction using marking codes and conducting peer/self-evaluation during the writing process.
   • Develop reading aloud and listening skills through integrating various language arts activities.
   • Assess students’ performance and give students timely feedback for improvement by conducting various assessment activities. These include questioning, formative assessments, evaluation checklists and peer feedback sheets.
   • Engage students in self-access language learning through keeping a word bank, practising RSCWC spelling strategies, using dictionaries and assessing online tools (i.e. e-home book and A passage a week from Longman and Student Online Assessment from HKAAE.)

1. Reading Workshops

1. Approach
   • About 40% of the lesson time focuses on developing students’ reading skills and strategies by decoding words and using phonics.
   • Authentic readers with various text types are used in the lessons to boost students’ interest and curiosity in reading.
   • Most year levels, from Primary 1 to Primary 6, have lessons based on the DTS (Development of Text Sets) approach. It allows the students to study and analyse various text sets. Text sets include newspaper articles, storybooks, fiction or non-fiction, videos, and online material; this approach caters for learner diversity as some students learn better through visual stimulation and others by absorbing information from reading books, etc.
2. Strategies
   • The school has three Native English Teachers who collaborate and work closely with the local English teachers. Some classes will have two NET Teachers present, with the support of a local English Teacher, whereas other year levels will have one NET Teacher and two local teachers. It helps with communication, classroom management, and arranging group activities, games, and other related projects organised by teachers.
   • Frequent in-lesson assessments are conducted during this time to assess students’ reading progress, and it also allows teachers to give constructive feedback, support, and help where needed. Dolch sight words list, the Rainbow Reading Programme and the Thomson Learning PM Benchmark Levelling System help to enhance students’ reading skills.

1. English Language Environment Enrichment Programme

• The English team provides several activities students can participate in during lesson time. For Primary one, we have Animal Adventures, which visits our school yearly to teach our young explorers more about snakes, lizards, spiders and hedgehogs. Primary two learns more about fairy tales, goodies and baddies, character traits and what we can lessons from these magical stories. In addition, the students get to dress up as their favourite fairytale character! Primary four gets to explore poetry and to be excellent poets; they also visit the airport to learn how an airport functions, the security protocols you need to follow and where to get your flight information. Whereas Primary Five learns what ‘Detectives’ do, the language they use to solve crimes, and what can lead to catching a culprit. Primary six is to become environmentalists as they look at pollution and plastic’s dangers. They will challenge themselves to ensure we care for our environment better. On top of that, English games are to be played in the English Kingdom, movies to watch on Fantastic Fridays, and books to read on Mondays and Wednesdays.
• Conduct extra-curricular English activities and interest groups for students (English Ambassador Team (EAT) training, Rocket Readers, Public speakers, Tag Rugby, Reading Capriccio, English Musicals, drama, debate teams, airport visits and more.)
• Provide further opportunities to develop gifted children’s capability by nominating them for competitions (i.e., The Hong Kong Young Writers Awards, The Hong Kong Speech Festival, etc.)