During the 2022 summer holidays, William, our Grade 8 scholar, organised for Hiba Academy Hangzhou G8 pupils to become digital pen-pals with Year 9 pupils at The Wellington College to promote cross-cultural understanding between our sister schools and provide opportunities for our Junior High pupils to continue to develop their English language skills over the summer period.
Each pupil in the programme was paired with a pupil from The Wellington College and received each other’s email addresses to initially communicate and find the most suitable platform for them as a pair to continue their communication. Some of our pupils arranged Teams meetings to develop their English listening and speaking skills, whilst others moved to platforms such as Messenger and Snapchat to build their writing and reading skills.
The Summer Holiday English Programme’s launch year has received fantastic feedback from The Wellington College pupils and our Hiba School pupils, with them finding it a thoroughly valuable experience. Photos and videos of their holiday accounts of their summer adventures, as well as sharing insights into their daily lives, pupils have developed friendships across the world, which we are hopeful will continue to grow as they move through their education with us.
Comments from our students
Yoyo Zh
This summer, I talked to two people from England and enjoyed the conversation with them. We shared daily interests, like our favourite foods and photos of the sky. The incredible thing is that some of them have learnt some Chinese and sent the Chinese words to us. I enjoyed this significantly meaningful activity.
William L
I liked this activity because we could share our daily life with a child from another country, which was great fun.
Kitty Zh
This is an excellent experience for me. I made some friends from another country. We talked about many things that we wanted to share. It helped me improve my English and learn many new things about England that I had never heard of before. I hope we can continue to chat again in the future.
Daisy L
From this activity, the biggest gain is that I can share some exciting things with my British friend, improve my English, and teach my good friend the language of my own country. Moreover, the peer’s personality is quite similar to mine own. For example, we are both very talkative. Therefore, I think this activity can improve our social and language skills.
Sam X
In my personal opinion, I think this activity has broadened my horizon. For example, my partner introduced a tv show called stranger things which I then watched, which was fabulous.
Pupil leadership is an integral part of life for our pupils in Junior High. We continue to strive to ensure that our pupils are given the confidence and encouragement to initiate programmes, as William has with the Summer Holiday English Programme. We look forward to sharing future projects and events that our pupils have created to enhance learning in Junior High.
