First Visit 11 – 20 October 2016
Last year, British Council successfully ran a pilot year of the World Voice programme in Hong Kong with the support of the Swire Trust. We recruited eight local primary schools from Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai and Sham Shui Po, and 15 classes from Primary 1 – Primary 3 with 360+ students and 20+ principals and teachers were involved. We are grateful to receive renewed support from the Swire Trust again this year and we are running the World Voice Hong Kong Second Year programme from autumn 2016.
This year, we have recruited nine local primary schools from Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, Tseung Kwan O, Pok Fu Lam, and Shek Kip Mei, and there are 33 classes from Primary 1 – Primary 3 with 755+ students and 30+ principal and teachers involved in this one-year programme. In order to build up local support and resources for our Hong Kong mainstream primary school teachers, we are running a ‘Train the Trainer’ programme as well. We recruited five candidates to participate in this programme. We are delighted to have Richard Frostick, World Voice Artistic Director and Trainer for World Voice Hong Kong, to conduct the training for us again.
The two-week schedule was very packed but fruitful with lots of excitement. The programme started with a full-day training workshop for our Master Trainers. On 12 and 13 October, we had two full-day training workshops for both Master Trainers and teachers. It was a good opportunity for them to understand the programme and it helped everyone realise the importance of music for children’s cognitive development, learn how to use singing as a pedagogical tool more often in classes, and get to know each other and work together. Beside the training workshops, we scheduled school visits to those nine local primary schools over five days. We travelled around Hong Kong and visited 18 classes in total. We had productive meetings with each class teacher before and after the class visits. Because these were the first school visits, Frostick led the class lessons and applied the pedagogic skills for teachers to observe while teaching, and the class teachers reported that they picked up the skills easily.
Richard Frostick will return to Hong Kong in mid-February and mid-May next year to continue the training. Meanwhile, the World Voice team in Hong Kong will continue to give support to the teachers, as well as encourage them to use singing more often in class by embedding songs and music in the curriculum. We hope that this programme can help students with special educational needs feel socially included with their neurotypical classmates, and more adequately equip teachers to work with students in integrated classrooms.
A special thank you to below primary schools, principals, teachers and students:
Hing Tak School
PLK WWCWD Fung Lee Pui Yiu Primary School
SKH Chi Fu Chi Nam Primary School
Taoist Ching Chung Primary School
Taoist Ching Chung Primary School (Wu King Estate)
The ELCHK faith Lutheran School
Yan Chai Hospital Chan Lu Seng Primary School
Yan Chai Hospital Ho Sik Nam Primary School
Y.L. Long Ping Estate Wai Chow School
