10 Feb: Last school day before CNY

11-19 Feb: Chinese New Year Break

16-17 Mar: School Photo (TBC)

Dear Parents

Thank you to those who have completed the parent survey. If you have not yet, please take a few minutes to provide this important feedback to us. [Web Link] We will close this survey by the end of the week and will share results with families next week.

We have a few important messages about supporting your child on zoom, the mid-year report and the next resource pack. Please do take a few minutes to read through this newsletter.

Kind regards

Audrey Tang
Head of School

We truly appreciate that families are taking on much more responsibility for the children’s learning than ever before, and we cannot thank you enough. We understand the challenges as many of us are also working from home and managing our own children at home under these unusual circumstances. We believe our shared common goal is supporting children in becoming independent learners. We want the children to ask questions freely, reflect deeply, embrace the process of trial and error, develop a growth mindset, and learn new concepts at their own pace.

Please take a look at Brenda's most recent blog post on How can I help my child to learn on Zoom? [K1 Blog; K2 Blog] Here are some tips to keep in mind to maximise your child's learning opportunities and more importantly, to ensure they are learning and truly understanding the curriculum on their own.

Your child’s mid-year report is now available for viewing. Please refer to the graphics below to access your child’s report. We would like parents to refer to the Hillside VLE regularly and also contribute to your child’s learning journey records by adding your comments. For this new report, we are inviting those parents interested to contribute by adding your comment in the "parent response to learning" box.

We are currently preparing the next resource pack and our bus company has kindly offered to deliver the packs for us. We have been mindful of the weight of the resource pack, but with the bus company's help, we will have more flexibility with our packs' content.

We have now finalised logistics with the bus company. The buses will deliver the packs on Friday 29 January according to the going home schedule. If you miss this date, the second delivery attempt will be on Tuesday 2 February. Please go to your child’s normal bus stop to collect the pack at your child’s normal bus drop-off time. We have requested that the bus company to send a reminder SMS of the drop-off time to all families the day before delivery.

We will still post out packs for non-bus children/ walkers. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about the arrangements.

Thank you to those who attended the Parent Webinar with Dr Mark Gandolfi last Wednesday, I hope you found the session helpful. There was a lot of information to digest, so if you want to review the content or if you've missed it, you can access the slides here

These following points resonate with me the most:

• “If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.”― Ignacio Estrada

• Growth mindset of "I can and I will" shifting the mindset of "I cannot" to "I cannot yet."

• The merging of technology and education has been underway for the past two decades. With the advancement of technology, the education world will continue to change. These changes have been called many things from blended learning to the “new norm” of distance learning. We must think outside of the box and find ways to make education interesting for our digital natives, and leverage on the new benefits of technology to our children’s education journey.

Professor Eva Chen and her research team at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) are undertaking a research project. They would like to invite children between ages 4 and 7 years to participate online! The project focuses on how membership in social groups (such as ethnicity) can affect the way young children interact with others when they reach pre-primary school age when they begin to meet and befriend classmates outside of their immediate family. Relatively little research has been conducted to understand children's socialization processes outside of Western countries; thus, it is of great importance to conduct research in a culturally diverse Asian city like Hong Kong. You and your child's help with the project will contribute to the understanding of child development and the training of a new generation of researchers in Hong Kong.

Should you be interested in you and your child partaking in this project, kindly register your interest by 10 February using the Google Forms link: [Web Link]. Thank you!

Please click on the links below to visit our class sites and learning blogs. You can also access these posts on the class site via the ESF App under the “Home Learning” tile.

K1 Class Sites: Dolphin ● Frog ● Panda ● MonkeyAM / Monkey PM

K2 Class Sites: Dragon ● Gecko ● Tiger ● Turtle

K1 Learning Blog ● K2 Learning Blog