The 2019-2020 school year was a challenging one. The COVID-19 pandemic led to months of school suspension, affecting students’ studies and development, changing the way we deliver education and the interactions between teachers and students, reshaping communications between the school and parents. The pandemic forced all of these, which used to be done face-to-face, to resort mostly to videos, instant messaging platforms or phone calls. For kindergarten teachers who had never conducted video-based teaching or online classes, or those who only had limited knowledge of such new forms of teaching or lacked technical support, they were definitely trying their absolute best and learning along the way to cope with the new set of challenges.

Given that kindergarten-aged children have a short attention span, face-to-face interactions with adults are important to support their studies. Distance learning that persisted for months limed interactions between teachers and students, and has taken a toll on children’s overall learning effectiveness and their development.

During the period of school suspension, our class teachers made phone calls to parents regularly to provide updates on school and assignments, as well as to learn about the students and parents’ emotional, family or financial situations and changes. To our surprise, this enhanced the communication between the school and families, and allowed us to gain a deeper understanding of the current situation in our students’ family, thus enabling us and our social workers to provide them with the support they need.

The pandemic had brought many industries to a standstill. Many parents were facing immense financial hardship because of unemployment, layoffs and pay cuts. To help parents get through tough times, the “School-based tuition and meal fee remission scheme” was launched by our school management committee three times, offering financial assistance to parents in need to help them cover tuition and meal fees from February to October 2020.