Kingston Park in China -Nǐ hǎo, Pet!

The municipal government of the province of Chengdu, China, have been seeking outstanding schools with a reputation for creativity and outstanding provision of the arts for collaborative study. Following links made in the summer of 2016, Kingston Park Primary School was formally invited to attend an educational event celebrating international educational partnerships and to support the teaching and learning of the creative arts subjects at Montpellier Primary School in Chengdu.

During the Easter Holidays, Mrs Young and Miss Graham embarked on this adventure to Chengdu, in south-west China. The purpose of the trip was to support a new, innovative, primary school to become more creative in the teaching of their art, music, drama and maths lessons, as well as building a global teaching partnership offering teachers a new perspective on modern teaching strategies and children the opportunity to converse with and meet children from a different culture.

During the International Teaching Partnership event, Mrs Young and Miss Graham taught a series of lessons in front of 120 local teachers, government officials, colleagues from Canada, France, Australia and the USA , local press, as well as a further televised audience. They both received fantastic feedback on their innovative and creative teaching strategies, which will now be incorporated into the Chengdu schools’ curriculum.

In addition to this, Mrs Young and Miss Graham conducted research into areas of good practice in teaching and learning demonstrated by our partner school and they are currently trialling these new approaches in their maths lessons. We look forward to them sharing their results with all staff at a staff meeting in the near future.

Furthermore, the trip has also provided the opportunity to develop international links that continue to be nurtured and built upon. Subsequently, KPPS has now entered into a reciprocal teaching partnership with Montpellier and Pao Tong Shu primary schools in Chengdu. This means all the teachers will have the opportunity to support and learn mastery approaches to maths from our Chinese colleagues. This includes teaching exchanges, further joint studies into teaching pedagogy and webinars. The children at Kingston Park will have opportunities to converse with and share cultural experiences with the two schools, take part in comparative studies which identify the similarities and differences between living in Newcastle and Chengdu, and teach each other a new language.

In November 2017, we were delighted to welcome 15 pupils and 3 teachers from Montpellier Primary school to attend Kingston Park for 7 days. The Chinese pupils were immersed in school life, attending all lessons and working alongside our pupils. Following this, they then visited Newcastle city centre for a tour of our many wonderful tourist attractions and spent the day in Edinburgh seeing the sites and visiting the zoo. All children learnt lots about each other’s culture and education system.

We are pleased to be taking part in the September 2018 teaching conference in Chengdu and we will be taking 10 of our pupils to Chengdu during spring 2019.