Southside Apr 2018

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C

new school

hinese Academy (CA) is a new private school founded in 2017 sponsored by the International Chinese Academy Education Foundation (ICAEF) and the Confucius Hall (CH) of Hong Kong, aiming to provide premium education. The school is based on the principles of Confucius, a revered scholar of China and is considered as the teacher of all teachers. The historical Confucius Hall is a nonreligious scholastic organization will be a part of the school’s campus.

The Campus The on-site campus is a renovated school building located at Caroline Hill, a stone’s throw-away from the Hong Kong stadium. They share the same entrance with the Confucius Hall Secondary School temporarily. But the actual foundation for the new school building will start very soon, and they hope to open the new Chinese Academy Primary School (CAPS) campus in 2020. The new primary school campus will host 4 classes for each grade level up to grade 6. The model for the school campus looks promising. There will be three areas to the campus: the first two being the primary and secondary school buildings and the third will house the interactive multimedia library, gymnasium, cafeteria, SEM Lab and swimming pool. On completion of the primary school, the secondary school building construction will begin in 2021-2022, just as the current students graduate. Overall they hope to have four classes of 23-25 children for each grade level until 12th grade, which is a total of 1200 pupils.

Bilingual Immersion The school prides itself as one of the few schools in Hong Kong to offer a bilingual immersion curriculum. “When we talk of bilingual immersion really there needs to be a balanced percentage of curriculum time and instruction time in both languages for students to be able to become proficient in both languages”, says the school principal Ramida Din. “We believe that the language must be used in all subjects, in different situations, and in various activities in order to achieve full immersion”. Most of the subjects are taught in both languages. In CAPS, each subject is taught at 60:40 ratio, where 60% is in English and the rest of the time in Chinese. This the school believes, will enhance and develop an appreciation for Chinese language and go deeper to understand the culture. “We don’t stop at comprehension, but students are challenged to analyze, critique and create”, said Ramida

Global Citizens With the help of the school’s advisory board who are faculty members at Cambridge, Oxford, and Hong Kong University they hope to bring in international and global perspective into

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