St. James’ Settlement Belcher Kindergarten Childcare Centre

St. James’ Settlement (SJS) Belcher Kindergarten is a Christian school, where all are committed to creating a loving, caring and joy-filled learning environment. SJS Belcher Kindergarten aims to provide holistic care and a comprehensive education system to foster a child’s positive self-image, kindness, initiative, sense of responsibility and confidence.

We work as a team to achieve and exceed the following objectives

• To understand the needs of children at different learning stages and provide corresponding care and education.
• To provide an ideal learning environment that is conducive to learning and encourages children to be self-motivated, happy in learning and to grow healthily.
• To carry out diverse teaching activities to enable children to acquire different learning experiences and outcomes; learning through games plays an important role in achieving this.
• To develop a moral understanding in each child as well as a following of rules, love and care for others.
• To provide selective activities within the classroom, so as to experience and understand the current standards and values in society, and to guide children to become responsible and confident throughout their lives.

Our school adopts ‘project-based learning’ and Whole language learning in pedagogy; to instill a child’s interests, experiences and development needs.Through exploration, observation, experience, sharing and data collection, children are able to construct their knowledge, enhance their skills, establish positive values and foster good living habits. There are complementary activities in each project theme used to cultivate our students’ learning experiences, with some of the activities including field trips, parent-child activities, presentations and so forth.

Moreover, children are encouraged to express themselves and record their daily life experiences by writing and drawing pictures in their ‘Project Folder’. In this way, the learning process is recorded and presented as a reference for parents and children.

Furthermore, our project process also emphasizes Whole language activities that aim to enrich a child’s language knowledge and strengthen their language ability. This is achieved by creating stories, conversations and sentences in which the children can learn language through reading, writing, listening and speaking.

Our school focuses on language learning and is dedicated to carrying out biliteracy and trilinualism within the curriculum. Besides the two class teachers, each grade class is equipped with a Mandarin teacher and a half-day Native English teacher to create and ensure an abundant trilingual learning environment.

In regards to Mandarin learning, children are given opportunities to listen and speak through daily activities such as games, conversations, stories, nursery rhymes, creating stories and so forth.

From the perspective of English learning, children learn by completing a variety of activities, such as playing games, having conversations, learning phonics, storytelling and songs. The students can also expand their vocabulary in shared reading activities, as well as through show-and-tell.

Thus, the children acquire sufficient opportunities in their Mandarin and English learning to express themselves, become engaged, involved and enjoy themselves by participating in interesting activities and therefore, learning how to present themselves confidently in Mandarin and English.

In order to nurture the children’s artistic accomplishment and self-expression, they have specialist teaching in aesthetic education, dance, music and gymnastics, all of which explore a child’s interest in art and seek to develop creativity and collaboration. Our school arranges an hour of aesthetic activities each week in-line with project-based learning. Both individual and collative creations nurture children in picture creation and the use of color and material. In addition, the children are encouraged to use their five senses to develop and stimulate their creativity.

A combination of the Royal Academy of Dance, ballet and SDM Jazz & Ballet Academy courses, which enhance a child’s knowledge in dancing, mime and music, are incorporated within our curriculum. Students learn through various elements to appreciate and enjoy dance.

Our school focuses on nurturing and establishing an important role of music in student development. Music education can benefit a child’s characteristics and physical development. Children are taught to be self-confident, optimistic and proactive in an environment enriched with abundant encouragement, love and music.

Our school promotes the importance of the physical development of children by arranging daily physical activities as well as a weekly gymnastic class to develop a child’s physical coordination and flexibility of movement, as well as to encourage the habit of participating in sports and exercise. In addition, Sports day for K2 and K3 classes are held 3 to 4 times per year at the local sportsground, physical activities such as obstacle races and basketball competitions increase the amount of exercise and stretching, which enhance their a child’s physical capabilities.