News

A Message From Our Principal

Dear Parents,

 Welcome to the Silvermine Bay School Learning Community!

I hope you all have had a wonderful summer break. Our team has been busy preparing for the new academic year and are excited to get started.  I would like to take this opportunity to talk to you about Silvermine Bay School’s Vision, Mission and Values as we embark on our 2022/23 learning journey.

Our Vision: Create a learning community to inspire our next generation to flourish and make the world a better place.

Our Mission: To promote students’ well-being through engaging learning experiences.

Our Values: Our school promotes positive education values: Positive Emotions; Engagement; Relationships; Meaning; Achievement (PERMA)

Let’s start with our school’s Mission. We have always aimed high and helped students to have high expectations for themselves. We have high expectations,
but that does not mean that we are an education factory, training students to get straight As. We understand each child is different: students are in
different developmental stages and face different learning challenges. We are also aware that those factors are constantly changing.

We believe our school has the unique edge to maximise the potential for our students. We have the best teacher to student ratio in Hong Kong, allowing us to work in small learning groups and create personalised learning experiences.

It is one of the biggest challenges for educators to engage students in learning something they might not be good at in the beginning. Our strategies to overcome this include developing our students’ Growth Mindset through creating an environment where everyone can make mistakes and learn safely. We plan on locating students’ ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ through continual assessment and personalised learning design. We plan to help students learn effectively and monitor their own learning progress by Deliberate Practice and the appreciation of Hard Fun.  

In terms of strategies to promote our school’s Values, we would like to continue exploring means of conveying the Growth Mindset and Character
Strengths by using visuals, songs, stories,etc. It is particularly important for our school because our goal is a lot more than academics. We
would like to equip every child to live a happy and meaningful life through Positive Education.

Last year, students learned about the meaning of Character Strengths and what it looked like in different situations. Teachers and students had lots of Character Strength sharing during assemblies, circle times, literacy lessons, etc. We started a programme where students were presented with weekly Character Strengths Stickers and End-of-Year badges, honouring every student with Character Strength stickers that were unique to them, promoting their demonstrated Signature Character Strengths. We also created a beautiful school song about Character Strengths, that our students sang at our Graduation Ceremony. 

This year, we would like to take Positive Education to the next level.

First of all, we would like to invite all parents and carers to learn more about the 24 Character Strengths we are promoting. You might find out more on this website: https://www.viacharacter.org/character-strengths

If parents can use the language of Character Strengths at home to praise their child, it would be 10 times more effective than just using it within the school context. From my personal experience, using the Character Strengths language at home as well as school, I have been able to see and appreciate the good characters my son demonstrates in daily life. It has helped with my father-son relationship. My child is not only happier, but also more willing to demonstrate good behaviour within our family unit and in his greater community. In order to make it convenient for parents to support us in this venture, one of our goals is to create an app for our school community to use at home. It will be a very user-friendly app to keep track of the positive Character Strengths at home. We are now in the very early stages of development, please feel free to give us your opinion and feedback.

Secondly, we will continue to award students with Character Strengths stickers (a Character Strengths Collection Booklet in the midst of design) and award three badges throughout the year (one badge per term). One of the most effective ways of teaching Growth Mindset is helping students to develop positive self-talk. In a nutshell, we need to work on the language students will actually use in their daily lives. We will create cards with a simple sentence about different Character Strengths. Again, we are now at the very early stages of developing a set of cards with some beautiful visuals and positive language. Please feel free to give us your opinions and feedback.

Thirdly, we have an after-school learning centre ‘ZZZPlayground’ on the second floor. For the past couple of years, we had some learning activities happening there and the options of activities were limited. We are planning to support students’ after-school activities in a different way. Instead of arranging extra-curricular activities by ourselves, we would like to help to provide information for our community to make better informed choices in the available after-school activities around South Lantau. Last year one of our parents volunteered to compile all the learning activities for kids in South Lantau. Continuing this notion, we will compile a collection of after school activities. Please let us know if you would like to join this project and help to organise and present the data for
the community.  

We are fully aware of the implication of the adage ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. The key to achieving our school’s Vision is to create a learning community.
We would like to invite you all to join us with this project and together we can make the world a better place.

Looking forward to seeing you all in the new academic year!

Kind regards,

Will Tong

Principal

2022 08 25