Maybe you don't believe it. Primary school students in New Zealand have no textbooks. If there are no textbooks in primary schools in China, I think everyone is going crazy. Without textbooks, how can we know what children have learned at school? That can only be done through homework. But parents soon became disappointed. In the lower grades of primary school, they actually didn't have any homework to take home. At most, they brought back a few pages of story books, saying that the teacher took them home to show them. The result is that parents listen to their children every day, but the children read the sentences in the story very skillfully. Why are those story books always so simple?
It turns out that these are all training in reading comprehension. After six years of primary school, the reading comprehension level ranges from 1-40 to semi-independence and complete independence. These levels are not divided according to the grade you are reading, but according to the child's real reading comprehension ability. In other words, it is possible that the child has reached the sixth grade, but his reading comprehension ability is the same as that of some third-grade students. No matter what the reading ability of children is, there will be different books to take home, which is completely personalized education. Moreover, the criteria for dividing these levels are unified, which ensures that students can smoothly connect with the new school after transferring. In each level, there will be further division, such as 10 level, which may be divided into 10 small levels to ensure that the level is as personalized as possible and not across the board. In other words, there are 30 children in the class, and the story books that each child takes home to read may have different levels. After the story book is taken home, children should not only see whether the pronunciation is accurate, but also understand the content of the story. After returning to school, students will do some exercises about stories, which may be to supplement sentences, make up a few sentences, or judge right or wrong. But these topics are all around the content of storybooks. Only when the accuracy reaches 80% can they pass the test and read the next level of books. Otherwise, you can only continue to read the original story book. With the improvement of reading ability, children bring home more and more books, fewer pictures and more and more words. The teacher will also instruct each student on the difficulty of borrowing books from the school library every week according to their reading level.
In addition to the grading of reading ability, the original vocabulary level (that is, how many words you know) is also graded. After six years of primary school, the word level is from A to X, and the word level is climbing step by step. The number of words has a great influence on reading comprehension. Therefore, every once in a while, children will have a test. For example, if the A-level topic is completely correct, then you can do B-level until there is an error in C-level, then your vocabulary level is C-level. Although they are all classmates, they may have completely different questions. In a class, it is normal for someone to get a U grade, but someone is still an E grade.
The homework assigned by the teacher to the children is also very lively and interesting. Children love reading stories, and your homework is to write story books. In addition to making up their own stories, the children also illustrated them. After this illustrated book was completed, the children also found a small box, put the story book in the box, painted various patterns on the box, decorated the box beautifully, and then handed in their homework. Besides making up stories, the children will visit some exhibitions, and then the teacher will assign homework according to the grade. For example, in the sixth grade, visiting the exhibition of the painter Leonardo da Vinci will allow children to write a character introduction and introduce the life of Leonardo da Vinci in combination with the stories they have read. Although parents don't know how teachers teach these studies without textbooks, they can see that children are learning happily every day through homework.
Another characteristic activity of the students in this school is giving a speech. Usually 2-3 minutes are given in grades 3 and 4, and 3-4 minutes in grades 5 and 6. The content of the speech is unlimited. In the lower grades, it is only a descriptive speech. In the senior year, it is a speech to express your views on certain social phenomena. In the lower grades, they talked about space, coconuts, football, cats and dogs, and dreams. In the third year of high school, they began to understand some social phenomena and express their opinions, such as whether whaling is a good thing or a bad thing. In order to make a good speech, they need to borrow a lot of relevant books from the library, look up relevant information from the Internet, then write a long article, cut it out and practice at home. How to control the time of speech and how to attract the attention of the audience are all learning processes to cultivate children's comprehensive ability.
Students in this school seldom do their homework. Maybe you don't believe it. Two A4-sized homework assignments, which were handed in on Monday, handed in on Friday, and one week's homework! Unbelievable, right? For domestic students, I'm afraid there is more homework in one day than them. As I said above, most children finish such a long masterpiece about Leonardo da Vinci's life in class. You can say that the teacher is trying to prevent the "gunman" from being written by the students themselves, or you can say that the teacher doesn't want to increase the extracurricular burden of the students, so that they can really finish class after class. The homework of two small A4 papers once again shows the personalized education of the school. It turns out that their math learning is graded, so each student's math homework on A4 paper is different. Of course, the level of mathematics in China is much higher than that in Japan.
There is so little homework in class, and the four holidays are completely "0 homework", so that children can really have a holiday. Therefore, during the holidays, according to their own interests, some children learn to ride horses, some learn to shoot arrows, and some learn to draw. These are mostly short-term courses for two or three days. At the same time, there are many more students borrowing books from community libraries. This is their way of education: learning is not compulsory, but if you want to learn, you won't be unable to find a place to find the pleasure of knowledge.
What I want to emphasize to you is that it is not the characteristic of this school that there are no textbooks, and schools all over the country are like this. Although students don't have textbooks, teachers have unified textbooks; The amount of homework assigned by teachers varies from school to school. The weight of these two A4 sheets is acceptable in the eyes of the Japanese, although some schools have no homework at all. Such an easy primary school study is unimaginable in China. Besides their simple math study, there are some things worth pondering. The first is their professional subdivision of reading and vocabulary, and the targeted education for students according to these subdivisions. Of course, these are the results of long-term investigation and study by educators, but on the other hand, the task of domestic education reform is still very arduous. Secondly, in their primary education, they learned how to find information in the library and cultivate their comprehensive ability, which is also lacking in domestic primary schools. Finally, why don't their tests on reading and vocabulary make children feel stressed? How do they design these topics? I think these problems are not only worthy of educators' consideration, but also worthy of our serious consideration as parents.