HK Employment Manpower Bureau (EMB), Kowloon, Hong Kong. August 2006 – August 2007
At Choi Wan St. Joseph’s Elementary School in Kowloon, Hong Kong, I was a NET (Native English Teacher). My position was to create a friendly English environment for the students.
Being the only Native English speaker in the school, I worked closely with English Teachers to develop curriculum and to share best practices. I created a special English room where students could ‘hang out’ and practice their English where I got to merge my love of Art with English practices.
Choi Wan St. Joseph’s was an ‘afternoon school’ and we shared the building with a ‘morning school’ which was a fascinating experience for me. I regularly attended NETS workshops organized by the HK EMB to collaborate with other NETS in the Hong Kong region. I was also lucky to be welcomed into such a generous and culturally rich school. Although we did have scheduled classes every other Saturday, it was a treat to visit all levels of English classes from kindergarten to grade 8, as well as organize and facilitate morning ‘English’ announcements, English lunchtime speaking club and ‘English’ speaking fairs.
With my English Enrichment classes, my keen students came early to school every day to learn how to use English for practical and relevant uses as a native speaker. The focus for this class was to use English in real-life experiences as these students were interested in attending schools overseas in the future. We studied units on Nutrition, creating a shopping list and going shopping together (in English!) before creating our Food Art and Eco-Awareness developing a campaign to highlight endangered animals and to educate the rest of the school, by creating posters, announcements and a recycling drive.
You can see the PPT we created based on our disturbing research here. A Surpise!
To improve the level of English used in the school, I created a question of the week programme, wherein I interviewed students and posted their answers (with pictures) through out the school. At first the students were nervous to have their pictures and answers to the questions laminated and posted along the stairwells, but as the year progressed, I had line ups of students waiting outside the staff office for me every Wednesday wondering what the next question would be and if their answer could be posted.
Amy Atkinson 