School Visit: St. Andrews

I was very excited to visit schools towards the end of the trip!

In Singapore, their school year follows the calendar year, so they started on January 2, 2013 and will go until Friday, November 20 (40 weeks of school). In comparison, in the US our school year goes from September-June for 180 days (36 weeks of school).

The first school I was able to visit was St. Andrew's Junior School.

This school is unique because it has a 1-to-1 laptop-student program. I was able to visit a P3 (Grade 3) class that was studying energy. There were 40 desks in the room (a couple of the desks were empty the day I visited). Here are some photos of the students learning in the classroom - they often moved back and forth between their desks/computers and as a group in the front of the room. At St. Andrews, they have common powerpoint slides for each lesson, so that all the teachers are using the same slides to teach each lesson. In addition, Mr. Yeo, the teacher, used his smart board to display a google-doc form that each student was typing into from their own computers. This is how he facilitated much of the discussion.

On the computers and on the smart board the students watched some video clips about energy transfer, answered questions on their computers about the concepts of energy. The teacher emphasized the difference between temperature and heat. The teacher also showed a video of an experiment he had done with a prior class he taught, but these students did not get to do any experiment during this lesson.

Here are some photos of the school's "Eco Garden." My understanding is that all primary schools in Singapore have some type of garden like this.