By Simon Shikongo

Welcome to the 2021-2022 school year! We hope you enjoyed your summer holiday – at least it was longer than last year’s – and that September has been a good month for you and your family.

The Huamei Kindergarten team welcomed six new teachers for this year: Miss Jojo and Miss Pan joined the Chinese teachers, and Miss Cherish, Mr Francois, Mr Ron and Ms Yuri joined the International teachers. We are excited to have them join us, and already we are benefiting from their wealth of experience, ideas and enthusiasm.

As is tradition, there was a welcome ceremony for the students on September 10, which also happened to be Teacher’s Day. It was held in the kindergarten playground, which was renovated over the summer and looks bright and fresh these days. The students all looked so smart in their uniforms, and they were delighted to come together as a team to release purple and white helium balloons into the sky.

Another highlight of the first month was the Mid Autumn Festival celebration. The Medium and Senior students were encouraged to dress in traditional clothes they brought from home, and together with some beautiful lanterns, they explored the school campus at night. Next, it was time for a large outdoor gathering in the kindergarten playground. Students tried to see the moon (but the night was cloudy, so it was only visible sometimes), and got to enjoy fresh fruit and mooncakes that they had helped make themselves the day before.

All classes are now studying the first Unit of Inquiry (UOI) for the year. Junior students are exploring the idea that through play, people express their feelings and come to new understandings. So far in their English IB lessons, students have created puppets of family members. They can use their creations to play different family roles and think about different social interactions.

The Medium students are learning how people experience and share stories through various ways. To begin with, they are looking at the story of The Three Little Pigs, and how it can be expressed in different ways. Students have created their own puppets of the characters, and experienced the story in different mediums (book and animated cartoon).

For Senior students, the UOI is how people understand multiculturalism, and build up patriotism. The students are lucky that they get to see people of different cultures every day because of the diversity of the international teachers at Huamei Kindergarten. In one of their English IB lessons this month, students go to learn the nationalities of all the international teachers, and then colour in the flags of those countries.

The Connection class are focusing on where we all live: Guangzhou. The objective is to appreciate that people know and understand local culture, and build up patriotism. So far, the Raccoon class students have learned the English names for various landmarks around Guangzhou (Canton Tower, the Guangzhou Circle building), and can now say the name of at least one landmark in the district they personally live in.

On behalf of the Huamei Kindergarten team, we wish you a fun and safe National Holiday, and we look forward to seeing all the students return again in October.