Subscribing Parents Event
June 23rd Thursday 19:00

[V-Shark Saying] Shenzhen Victoria Park Academy is a Year 1 to Year 9 bilingual school. Victoria Education Organization was founded in Hong Kong in 1965, and is well known in Hong Kong for its excellence in academics, character building, and individual nurturing of young learners.

VPA will integrate the Chinese educational tradition of respecting the teachers and valuing rigorous academic disciplines, with the pioneering teaching concept of inquiry-based learning. The Academy continues the 50 years’ tradition of immersive bilingual education – ‘one teacher, one language’. 

In order to help you gain a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of VPA, V-Shark will introduce the curriculum system featuring IB, Technology and Innovation, Holistic Education and Language Literacy from now on.

Before taking a glimpse at what we do in language learning, V-Shark would like to ask a few questions first:
-Is reading as natural as speaking?
-What to do with a child who is eloquent in speaking but has difficulties in writing?
-How to help students turn their thoughts into practice through reading and writing?

In the era which highly advocates reading, reading is increasingly sought after by educational experts and parents both as educational approaches and as teaching contents. More and more teachers around the world have realized that the meaning of reading is not only to decode texts, memorize facts or answer questions correctly, but also to encourage students to constantly deepen their thinking on what changes of mind or new thoughts can be drawn from the reading process.

At VPA, we provide:  

Language Literacy
•Columbia University Literacy Program(bilingual)
•Words Their Way - Word Study, Phonics & Vocabulary Building Program(English Phonics Programme)

Inquiry Learning
•IB PYP

What is TCRWP?

Professor Calkins is far more typical in the world of curriculum development: She is a teacher, a writer, and a theorist.

卡尔金斯教授远程参加我们在前海举办的教育论坛画面

Professor Calkins became a revolutionary leader in education by bringing these practices to young children at a time when penmanship, spelling and sentence structure were often a bigger focus. At Teachers College, she began training educators in New York City schools, prompting them to give children “writers’ notebooks” to chronicle their lives.

The Columbia Teachers College Reading and Writing Program’s purpose is to foster a life-long love of reading and writing, and to inspire children to be avid readers and writers. Time is given each day for active and purposeful engagement in reading and writing. One of the most important aspects of the program is the concept of choice. The students themselves choose what they want to read and write about, ensuring that they are active participants in their learning.

The Reading and Writing Project now partners with approximately 700 schools and supports tens of thousands of teachers each year. TCRWP runs almost forty mini-institutes annually on topics ranging from teaching nonfiction reading to equity, from phonics to supporting kids with IEPs, and it annually leads over a hundred locally based institutes in school districts worldwide.

Source：TCRWP 2019 Data Report

What is the balanced literacy program?

We provide a supportive learning experience for our students, who can conduct their own learning according to the strategies provided by the teachers. The Reader’s & Writer’s Workshop ensures balanced literacy as there is daily practice of read-alouds, guided reading, shared reading, phonics, independent reading, interactive writing, shared writing and word study.

At VPA, we encourage students to read and write independently in reading workshops and writing workshops. We offer a curriculum that integrates reading and writing workshops where they are inseparable and supporting each other.

There are differences between shared reading and reading workshops. In shared reading, students read the relatively harder article for 4 or 5 days, from the teacher to the end of the students can read on their own, to help students learn and repeat reading strategies, improve language reading fluency, accuracy, comprehension and reading habits, so that students learn to write from "writers".

Shared writing and interactive writing are written by students and teachers, students provide ideas or opinions, and teachers demonstrate writing: sentence structure, grammar, words, and revisions. 

How to read and write on grade level?

When children enter primary school, they begin to establish writing awareness. The first step in writing is for the teacher to clearly demonstrate. In traditional classes, teachers attach importance to rules. For example, the first letter should be capitalized, each letter should be written within a line, a finger should be left between the letters, and punctuation should be added at the end of the sentence.

都说“兴趣是最好的老师”。在VPA，我们辅助学生尽可能的多表达，鼓励学生自由地选取写作内容。

根据学生的兴趣、需求来教学，我们提供非常个人化的指导与反馈：

- 学生有大量的选择机会：包括阅读什么书，如何选择适合自己的图书（分层阅读），写作什么题目，如何从策略工具库中选择自己需要的阅读或写作策略，何时重读、重写、编辑修改，如何设定自己学习目标等等；
- 每堂课都有老师一对一面谈及小组指导（3-4个人）；
- 学生在学习社群中学习：阅读伙伴、写作伙伴共同讨论、回应、轮流练习策略、寻求建议、给予反馈、共同庆祝。

VPA课程设计负责人Gloria向我们详细描述了一年级的写作工作坊过程。首先，在10分钟的迷你课中，老师会联系生活中的趣事、情景，引发学生的兴趣，然后通过展示、发问与发现、逐步教导、利用实例等方式教授学生一个具体的写作策略。学生会和写作小伙伴一起练习刚刚教过的策略。

接下来学生将有20-30分钟的时间写作，与此同时老师则会进行一对一反馈或小组指导。每堂课结束前学生们可以和伙伴分享自己的作品。VPA的写作课非常注重过程。教师会鼓励学生思考对自己来说有意义的事物作为写作主体，指导学生自拟计划，述说、讨论写作内容，然后才写作初稿并修改。针对低年段学生，我们还会鼓励他们将内容画出来辅助思考。每个学生的写作作品也会公开发布，邀请伙伴、亲友一同庆祝。

Principal Koong shared a recent case of writing workshop at VSA.

In this class, students were encouraged to twist fairy tales. The story of "Cinderella" becomes the "cunning Prince" under the student's pen. And the three little pigs have very different fairy tale endings.

Principal Koong introduced the lesson this way: "These fairy tales have been interpreted in many different versions, and the children do not read for the sake of reading the classics, but to deconstruct the classics and recreate the narratives."

"Bilingual writing courses are not simply Chinese or English translations, we will use English for reading analysis and writing according to the children's favorite topics, and Chinese for another one. It is most difficult to get Chinese and English teachers to work closely together to design a curriculum, which is hard to be implemented in many schools. " Principal Koong emphasized, "In the writers’ workshop, we allow children to make spelling and grammatical errors, and encourage them to be bold and creative."

How to express emotions, reflections, and findings?

Taking the IB philosophy as the core, we have been designing and developing various courses at VSA, and the language and literature curriculum is inseparable from the IB learning method. ATL, as an approach to learn, is blending in a concept-driven inquiry curriculum with language learning.

五种相关联的技能旨在支持所有年龄段的学生成为自我调控的学习者。他们懂得如何提出好的问题，设定有效的目标，追求自己的抱负并有决心实现它们。这些技能也能促进学生的能动性，鼓励他们将自己的学习视为一个积极和动态的过程。毋庸置疑，语言能力可以帮助学生提升交流和社交的能力，我们在语言学习中，如何塑造学生研究、思考的能力呢？

这就回到了文章开头提到的问题：如何利用语言学习帮助学生将想法和思考转换为实际行动？

VSA中文学科建设负责人Connie分享了一个高年级的概念驱动的单元案例。在整本文学作品单元 《喜宴》的教学设计中，学生层层细读文本，并积极思考不同观点、多元文化与身份认同在文本中的呈现，学生通过ATL学习活动，将具体性的知识转化为概念性理解，最终能够迁移到新情境或现实问题中，展开对全球议题的探讨。

通过对《喜宴》的文本分析，学生自拟探究话题。从问题入手，训练学生有效提问的能力；教师搭建“支架”，引导学生多角度思考，训练学生查找细节和整合例子的能力。通过教师专业的引导，学生由浅入深地建构理解。

Connie指出，在小学项目（PYP）的超学科学习中，学生掌握的概念包括形式、功能、原因、变化、联系、观点、责任和反思。在所有的IB课程中，教学都要对概念进行探索，帮助学生建立联系，从而学以致用、举一反三。

The above is the VPA course feature introduction series of [Language Learning]. we will focus on whole person education and give more detailed introduction to our whole-person education in the next article. Stay tuned.