Chinese
Discover how pupils master, treasure, and love Chinese through creative reading, blended learning, and cultural activities like calligraphy and tea appreciation.
Our Goals
Master the Language: To develop pupils’ language competencies in listening, speaking, reading and writing in an engaged learning environment.
Treasure the Language: To make the learning of Chinese, Malay and Tamil meaningful by promoting the cultural richness found in each Language.
Love the Language: To spark the joy of learning Mother Tongue Languages with interesting and engaging instructional activities and programmes.
Programme
Reading Programme
The objective of the programme is to provide opportunities for pupils to be exposed to Chinese reading materials as well as to inculcate the interest of reading more Chinese books. There are a variety of reading programmes across the levels.
Pupils showcase their creativity and inventive thinking in our Annual Creative Reading Competition.
P1 Creative Reading Competition-Bookmark Design
P2 Creative Reading Competition-Creative Comic-strip Writing
P3 Creative Reading Competition-Book Recommendation Poster
P4 Creative Reading Competition-Book Review Poster
P4 Creative Reading Competition-Book Review Poster
Mother Tongue Language books of different genres and themes are carefully selected, reviewed and added to our class library to bring pupils into a world of fascinating stories and fantasies.
Beautiful and uniquely designed book badges are rewarded to pupils who borrow and read Mother Tongue books actively. Reading certificates are awarded to classes that read the most books in each semester.
Pupils are introduced to famous stories around the world during lessons on World Book Day.
Blended Learning
With the development of technology, it creates opportunities for our teachers to incorporate blended learning in their classrooms. Through a mix of home-based and in-school activities, pupils get to leverage both online and offline approaches to facilitate their learning of the Mother Tongue Languages.
Pupils are doing self-directed learning on the Student Learning Space (SLS) platform
Young Journalist Enrichment Programme
Young Journalist Enrichment Programme is introduced to selected Primary 4 pupils. During the programme, pupils are taught journaling skills and how to draft good interview questions on their own to ask their interviewees. It cultivates pupils to be critical thinkers and reflective learners.
Being digital natives, pupils get hands-on experiences with the usage of ICT applications to put together a news report.
Pupils also get real-life experiences to be a young journalist at our school events, where they draft interview questions, interview fellow school mates and school staff and broadcast their curated news to the whole school during morning assembly.
Through the programme, pupils grow to become effective communicators.
Making Thinking Visible
Critical and creative thinking skills are very important in teaching and learning. One key tool for developing and accessing these skills is by making thinking visible. Our Mother Tongue Department teachers design a range of activities with the incorporation of suitable thinking routines for our pupils to support their composition writing.
By tapping on visible thinking routines such as “See-Think-Wonder”, “Name-Describe-Act”, “Main-Side-Hidden” and “Sentence-Phrase-Word”, pupils make good progress in their composition writing.
Collaborative learning, promoting thinking and discussion using Padlet
Differentiated Instruction
Every pupil is unique and has an individual learning style. Thus, not all the pupils grasp a subject in the same way or share the same level of ability. Our teachers use differentiated instruction in our daily teaching so that we can reach everyone in class, help pupils with different learning styles and of different ability to make great learning progress.
Composition writing with DI
Formative Assessment
Formative assessments give teachers the ability to provide timely and targeted feedback to the pupils. This allows our pupils to be part of the learning environment and to develop self-assessment strategies that will help with the understanding of their own thought processes. Our Mother Tongue Department teachers design different types of Formative Assessment materials in every day teaching, so that pupils could make continuous improvement with the feedback and guidance given by their teachers.
INOVAT Virtual Escape Rooms
In 2021, MTL department collaborated with our Innovation Department to design a Virtual Escape Room creation experience for our Primary 5 Higher Mother Tongue pupils. A digital escape room is a cooperative play experience where a team of players solves a series of puzzles online in a set amount of time to win. Pupils translate their academic learning to the project, building on their interpersonal and collaborative skills. This Escape Room also ignited their creative spark and encouraged perseverance.
P5 students are designing escape room based on the book《三国演义》
Events
Mother Language Fortnight
The objective of the programme is to provide opportunities for pupils to appreciate the beauty of Chinese Language and culture. It has always been one of the crown jewels amongst the various programmes of the Mother Tongue Department.
During the two-week long programme, pupils were engaged in many fun-filled activities like calligraphy, karaoke, story-telling and the appreciation of Chinese tea. There were also level competitions such as Creative Reading and Writing competitions.
In 2021, “Mother Tongue-Cool” was also introduced to the pupils.
Students responded extremely well to the “Mother Tongue- Cool” activities, which encouraged pupils to share instances of them engaged in various daily activities whereby they are using their Mother Tongue Language. Creativity was unleashed and hidden gems unearthed as pupils showcased their talents through singing, comics drawing, acting out short skits and writing. It was truly an enjoyable time for both pupils and teachers alike.
Besides the “Mother Tongue- Cool” activities, pupils also engaged in various cultural activities. Our Malay pupils did “Kite Colouring”, “Wayang Kuilt Puppetry”and “Coaster Weaving”; “Agal Vilakku Painting”and “Copper Tooling” for our Tamil pupils; “Shadow puppet making” ,“Sachet making” and “Traditional Face Painting” for our Chinese pupils. These activities encouraged pupils to learn more about their culture in a fun and engaging manner.
Lantern making
Tea appreciation
Tamil Camp – Goat and tiger board game
Copper tooling
Batik painting by P3 Malay students
Kite coloring by P1 Malay student