On December 20, 2019, YWIES Tongxiang held a commendation assembly for the Secondary students. This was a culmination and celebration of all of the house points which students had earned during semester one.;

Ms Barton, our Secondary Co-ordinator shared the following information about this ceremony.

“This year, students have been allocated to houses. Within lessons and around the school, students can be given a house point by their teacher for demonstrating one of the 3 'Be's – being safe, being responsible and being respectful. Additionally, teachers awarded house points for work completed to a high-standard and questions answered well in class. Students can receive an excellence point for excellent work or contributions in class.”

Let’s hear more about this from some students in Grade 8:

“When I tried hard, I realised it was not so difficult as I had originally thought –How I made progress in Maths”

Amy is a Grade 8 student, who enrolled in YWIES Tongxiang campus in 2018. When she first joined the school, she felt very unhappy in Maths lessons or tests and did not want to try even a little. Mr Harry He (Maths Subject Leader), being a very experienced teacher, understood that if a student disliked a subject, it was possibly due to lack of encouragement. However, such factors should not prevent a student from making progress.

Mr He talked with Amy, and encouraged her to have the confidence to try, and not to worry because he was there to help her. Meanwhile, he also pointed out examples to increase her confidence. He told her that normally students could understand the questions and answer about 50%-60% of the questions correctly through one year study. After two years, they could manage about 70%-80%. Near the end of this semester, with her teachers’ help, Amy no longer felt nervous and also made great progress in Maths. Now she is the subject representative and sets a good example for other students.

Everything is interesting when you participate with enthusiasm.

Teachers were so proud of the students for what they did in the past Christmas Carnival. For example, Mr He praised Grade 8 student Daisy for her initiative and enthusiasm.

Every class prepared an activity for the Christmas Carnival, and Daisy organised a face painting activity with her classmates. She led them to prepare the materials and select outfits. Moreover, she also considered how to help other students. In lessons she is always the first one to offer help when her classmates need it.

How to reward students and develop team spirit?

Students earn house points during their daily lessons and other activities. By accumulating points they can get different commendations, such as excellence commendations, silver commendations and gold commendations. Only AMT members can award silver commendations and the gold commendation can only be given by SLT.

How do students get the awards? There are many ways, for example, some students received commendations for excellent sustained effort within the Scholastic reading programme, and others demonstrated excellent sustained effort and behaviour in their lessons. Some students represented the school in an English speaking competition, and others have spent more than 2000 minutes using the Scholastic reading programme; or were participants in the winning team in the Chinese debating competition.

Teamwork was far more important.

At the end of the assembly, we found out the total number of house points from commendations, and everyone was very excited to see the ranking of the different houses once the house points from Founder’s Day had been added. The current house in the lead is the Blue Sharks. However, there is still everything to play for in the 2nd semester, as the other houses are not far behind.

Ms Barton also told us:

“During the assembly, the students were both excited and delighted to receive their certificates; some of them were surprised in a good way which was lovely to see and they warmly encouraged one another through their regular applause.

The majority of the students earned certificates which were a great motivation to show them that as well as improving grades and academic progress, they had something to show for their good attitude and efforts to improve themselves. I’m sure that if students didn’t receive a certificate this time, they will want to double their efforts so that in our next commendations assembly, they can earn a certificate too!”