Details
Wee Care’s Great Starts programme seeks to give children an enriching immersion experience in Mandarin. Classes are mapped onto Wee Care’s highly successful Bright Starts programme and incorporate fun, exciting, hands-on and play-based activities in Open Learning, Life Skills, Numicon Math and Science, with the added distinctive feature of Mandarin as the language of instruction. Children continue to enjoy English lessons in Phonics and Literacy, but the main emphasis is always on understanding, thinking and speaking in Mandarin. There are many opportunities for purposeful play and social interactions with peers.
BENEFITS
Children who attend Great Starts are fully immersed in a Mandarin-speaking environment. This has been shown to increase their confidence in speaking and using Mandarin in natural contexts. In addition, receptive comprehension of Mandarin discourse, spoken in the context of dialogue, develops as the teacher seeks to establish shared meanings through meaningful learning and experience-based activities with her students.
Children who are typically exposed to a monolingual environment benefit from this opportunity to engage with their peers and caring adults in a stimulating, non-threatening and nurturing Mandarin setting. Research has consistently demonstrated that bilingual children exercise more flexible thinking processes when making sense of the world around them. Great Starts is a means thus to enhance thinking skills in the more complex globalised world that we all live in.
ACTIVITIES and FORMAT
The Great Starts programme is designed to give children a choice between going to school two, three, four or five times a week (daily). Each session lasts three (3) hours and comprises the following:
Welcome and Music Time
Classroom Instruction (1 hour)
Open (Experiential) Learning (1 hour)
Snack, Circle, Nature and/or Sensorimotor Time
Closing and Goodbye
In terms of content, the daily subjects are:
Mondays: Language Arts (in English) and Numicon Mathematics (in Mandarin)
Tuesdays: Open Learning (in English), Letters & Phonics (in English)
Wednesdays: Life Skills (in Mandarin) and Mandarin
Thursdays: Open Learning (in Mandarin) and Mandarin
Fridays: Language Arts (in English) and Science (in Mandarin)
The Great Starts programme is available only on weekdays with lessons running from 2pm to 5pm.
Wee Care was birthed from a heart that wants the best for infants, toddlers, children with special needs and their parents. Founded in 1996 by teacher and mother of three, Mrs Denise Lai, Wee Care began as a provider of home-based midwifery services to babies and new mothers. Eventually, the services took on an educational nature to ensure that infants and toddlers developed well whilst their parents were at work.
Three years later, Parent-Child PlayGroups were introduced to give working parents the opportunity to develop deeper bonds with their babies and toddlers through motivated, directed and purposeful play. At the same time, Behavioural Management Programmes were added to the fold to provide early assistance to children with special learning needs.
Today, Wee Care stands out among the crowd of educational centres as the home-grown pioneer in research-based Infant Development, Early Childhood Education and Early Intervention Programmes.
It is one of the top centres in Singapore for the rehabilitation of children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder and other developmental problems. Child psychologists at the KK Women and Children’s Hospital (KKH) and the National University Hospital (NUH) of Singapore, as well as those at private hospitals and clinics, make regular recommendations to their clients to seek therapy services here. ...
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