Little Learners Special:
Six schools share teaching and parenting tips
Raising children in the super-urban environment of inner Hong Kong can be concerning for parents. How will my child connect with nature on a daily basis? When will they get the chance to explore the environment? Or smell flowers or make mud pies? These are common queries, particularly for expats relocating from less built-up places.
Parenting in the Fragrant Harbour is not always as easy as going to the park and letting kids run wild. Hong Kong parks don’t all come with grass and trees (let alone dirt to make good quality mud pies!).
This is why Malvern College Pre-School’s Forest School programme will be appealing to many expat parents. Forest School offers preschoolers a fortnightly experience in an outdoor classroom – complete with bugs, dirt, rain and all the things that make playing in the elements such good fun. And, of course, it’s all a learning experience. The school was one of the first schools in Hong Kong to offer the Forest School programme.
As one parent reflects, “Malvern provides a great learning environment and is teaching my boy to be creative and resilient, as well as to be a critical thinker. We also love the Forest School; it’s the most valuable learning experience a child can ever get in Hong Kong.”
But it’s not all bug hunts and nature trails. This is a school grasping new technologies with both hands. On the flip side to Forest School, Malvern College Pre-School teaches students the fundamentals of coding and even has a school robot, Zenbo. Zenbo is a bilingual teaching aid; he greets students, follows teachers’ commands and even reads stories to the children in both English and Mandarin when they’re tired from exploring the great outdoors. The school is clearly aiming to offer the best of both worlds – the natural and technological – in its effort to create global citizens of the future. Malvern College Pre-School Hong Kong is at Units 9-12, Coronation Circle, 1 Yau Cheung Road, Southwest Kowloon. malvernpreschool.hk