29 April 2021
The school has always attached importance to the development of spiritual, moral, intellectual, physical, social and aesthetic education. Since the outbreak of the epidemic last year, teachers, students and parents have faced great challenges. The school has been affected by the epidemic on many occasions, with face-to-face lessons sometimes being completely suspended and at other times different year groups taking it in turns to return to school for half-day face-to-face lessons. The number of school days has also been significantly reduced compared to previous years. In order to deal with these obstacles, e-learning, Zoom, Google Classroom and other methods have been used to assist students with learning. Despite the benefits of these platforms, the long-term use of online teaching and learning is far from ideal in terms of students comprehensively developing themselves. Therefore, in the annual plan for this academic year, we focus how to use online teaching, enrich students' diverse development and provide mental and personal development. Ms Vivian Yung, our head of Arts Education Committee, led our a cappella choir with the hymn “I pray to You" through Zoom last summer. After uploading it to our school Facebook page, it was widely shared on the Internet and has been played more than 60,000 times. The hymn, with our girls’ beautiful voices, comforted, touched and healed the souls of many people in Hong Kong. This is a good example of teachers and students being creative and breaking the boundaries of Zoom. In addition to that, our orchestra also attended its first online competition. They won the gold medal in the "Orchestra (Secondary Section)" section of the Joint School Music Competition 2020, sponsored by the Hong Kong Joint School Music Association, for their exciting piece of music "The Avengers". Furthermore, they won silver in the "Music@e-Contest 2020", which was an international online music competition. In this event, students learnt from each other online with music lovers and performers from all over the world, and continued to improve their skills, technique and presentation. This is another milestone in our online music learning journey. Continuing with performance-based events, coming soon is our annual Pooi To show, "Arts in Action". Last year, students overcame the difficulties of the epidemic last year and worked hard to train online. However, with the epidemic being so severe last April, dates for training and for the event continued to change, and in the end we had to cancel it. We have learnt a lot from this, and decided to stick to online training throughout the year this time round. When the epidemic eased, we immediately conducted face-to-face training and video shooting, with social distancing maintained of course. At last, we have been able to record the performances that the students worked so hard to produce. This year's "Arts in Action" continues to receive strong support from the Parent-Teacher Association. Thank you very much. The programme is divided into two parts. The first will be launched on Friday, April 30. The content includes: an online orchestra, choir, guzheng, and bands. One surprising performance is from the Chinese Dance Team. They made full use of the school premises to showcase their dancing. The second part is the musical "Annie", which will be performed online in July. I hope that all teachers and students can enjoy the first part of Arts in Action this Friday, and appreciate the efforts of the students who have produced wonderful, heartfelt and outstanding performances. We will upload different sessions on our school’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pooito.edu.hk) from Saturday, feel free to enjoy.
Best regards, |
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“The LORD is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped; my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him.” |