Ms. Peilin Lee
Head of Chinese and Vice Principal, Bloom KKCA Academy

Biography

Peilin Lee has many years of hands-on experiences in curriculum design, pedagogy development, and teacher training of Mandarin Chinese education. She a strong believer and practitioner of Kinaesthetic and Tasked-Based Learning in a language learning setting. Peilin is currently the Head of Chinese and Vice Principal at Bloom KKCA Academy, an innovative bilingual school in Hong Kong. At Bloom, many Chinese Language Art teaching and learning activities take place in an immersive environment and through Project Based Learning. Building lower primary students’ literacy through scaffolded levelled reading is one of Peilin’s areas of focus in the coming years.

Topic

I. Implementing Scaffolded Leveled Reading to Build Chinese Literacy Skills
II. The story of “cells”–a PBL integrating entrepreneurship and community service

I. Implementing Scaffolded Leveled Reading to Build Chinese Literacy Skills
II. The story of “cells”–a PBL integrating entrepreneurship and community service

Abstract

I. Implementing Scaffolded Leveled Reading to Build Chinese Literacy Skills

When it comes to teaching K-12 Chinese literacy, the heavy focus on memorizing as many characters as possible often fails to build contextual understanding, even with significant effort and time investment from both teachers and students. Let’s explore how to implement a Chinese Levelled Reading program that starts with 20 characters and creates a structured path to progressively develop Chinese literacy skills using methods that work. This session aims to introduce a scaffolded levelling reading program targeted at improving Chinese literacy acquisition. The program begins with 20 foundational characters for basal reading and progressively advances through scaffolded 35 levels, accompanied by reading assessments and skills-focused worksheets. The program’s teaching and learning materials are easily adaptable for classroom use, allowing for structured and efficient instruction that strengthens students’ writing and reading capabilities.

Strategies for Engagement
Relate the session content to practical and real reading lessons. Engage participants to explore and resolve both common and overlooked issues in conventional reading lessons. Provide engagement opportunities for attendees, using participant feedback and examples to demonstrate how scaffolded levelled reading can be applied to diverse teaching environments including large classrooms, small groups, and personalized instruction with individual students. Outcomes: Attendees will leave with a refined levelled reading framework, empowering them to deliver more effective and time-saving teacher-led instruction.

II. The story of “cells”–a PBL integrating entrepreneurship and community service
Project-based learning (PBL) that integrates entrepreneurship and community service offers a dynamic way to teach and learn. It combines real-world problem-solving with hands-on experiences, allowing students to develop essential entrepreneurial skills while making a positive impact on their communities. The Grade 6 class of Bloom KKCA Academy initiated a fundraising event to supply new books to under-privileged children in our neighbourhood. By doing that, they successfully demonstrated innovative thinking, decision-making, design development, building & testing & evaluation, and project delivery.