1.  General

Our English staff are fully committed to enterprising, creative teaching strategies that help the school to not only reach its academic goals, but also help our students strive for the ‘better-than-expected’ excellence that we know they can achieve!

FAGPS has gained an excellent reputation amongst fellow schools and teachers with our innovative teaching strategies that encourage the students to do preparation before lessons; and take part in a widening variety of interactive activities and online teaching and learning, made all the more important in the Covid age.

In addition to this, we have developed tailor-made lessons that provide the students and teachers with instant feedback on whether the information taught has been picked up or whether more attention is required. This targeted-approach also helps the teachers scaffold the teaching materials and follow-up the students’ individual learning needs.

A final teaching strategy that we employ is to provide the option of extended self-learning for those who wish to know more about a subject than what was covered in class. We ensure all of our students are stimulated, enriched and motivated to acquire knowledge.

Finally, we ensure that Information Technology (IT) learning is done at least 100 times per year, to adequately ensure that our students are responsibly equipped to meet the challenges of the changing, modern world.

The combined result of all of the above occurs in a classroom environment that promotes problem-solving and creativity in all aspects of school work. Not to mention the students have ample opportunities to learn to cooperate and collaborate as part of a group, which improves each student’s social skills.

2.  School-based Curriculum

As caring teachers who want the best for our students, we balance our own self-created, school-based curriculum on the need to meet the EDB’s academic guidelines, but also provide our students with much-needed individual care and attention to help them achieve even greater results.

A school-based reading curriculum

• Reading skills form the basis of all learning at school. Successful readers not only enjoy learning more, but also achieve better results. Consequently, we have put extra attention into this cornerstone element.
• We have developed our own school-based reading program for P.1-P.6.
• Our reading program not only teaches reading skills, but provides different text types and materials from which to learn from, including: Big book reading for beginners (which promotes a happy association with reading), teaching phonics to enable students to learn how to read unknown words, and the use of famous literature to keep our students interested in reading.  

 A school-based writing curriculum

• This program emphasizes the 3E’s; ‘Enable’, ‘Encourage’ and ‘Establish’ in the process writing. Teachers use the 3E’s strategy while teaching the five stages of the writing process. Through the process, learners can explore and discover their thoughts, construct meaning and assess it simultaneously to help them maximize the quality of their written work.

A school-based speaking and phonics curriculum

•  Picture description skills, read-aloud skills, presentation and conversation skills are highlighted in the curriculum. Lessons are designed to be more practical in capture, to maximize learning.
• A variety of phonics sounds are taught in the programme. Learners acquire the phonics sounds and skills through isolating, segmenting and blending sounds.

​3.  NET Scheme   

The school is fortunate to have two Native English Teachers so that students have increased exposure and access to Native English speakers. The students’ confidence is increased this way and they are more willing to communicate in English. The two NETs also help to achieve the English Panel’s development targets, in addition to helping develop the school-based curriculums. The English Language environment has been significantly enriched with a wide range of activities, decorations, motivational posters and increased opportunities for speaking. These positive steps will lead to happier and more confident students.

4.  Catering to students with different abilities

At FAGPS, we understand that not all students progress at the same pace. We, therefore, provide remedial support for the less competent learners in all levels. As students are streamed according to their ability in remedial classes, it enables the teachers to also create lesson plans with 3 tiered-instructions to suit each of our students. Higher-ability learners are given the extra stimulation they need to appropriately push themselves, and lower-ability learners are also given more support. We believe that every student can thrive at their own pace.