Celebrating the fourth year in its Tseung Kwan O campus, Maple Bear Canadian Kindergarten Hong Kong has been offering world-class Canadian bilingual education to toddlers and preschoolers in the neighborhood since September 2019.
As an integral member of the growing Maple Bear family, which comprises 527 early childhood, elementary and high schools in 35 countries and counting, Maple Bear Hong Kong has a strong global network as its backbone to create a truly international learning environment for kids to become active learners and develop a global mindset at an early age.
“Maple Bear was able to grow a lot in the past three years,” says Arno Krug, CEO of Maple Bear Global. “We have opened schools in 15 new countries during the Covid era between 2020 and 2022. Last year, we grew by over 20 percent in terms of the number of students, and we are with around 58,000 students as of February.”
Bilingual immersive learning experience originated in Canada
Being bilingual is a lifelong learning process that transforms one’s brain physically, as numerous studies have shown that learning two languages at an early age offers both cognitive and linguistic advantages.
Instead of memorizing vocabulary in the classroom, students at Maple Bear Hong Kong learn English with qualified native English-speaking teachers under an immersion learning system. The English program is designed and constantly updated by the Maple Bear Faculty team of veteran educators, to reflect the latest in research and Canadian educational pedagogy to fulfill the actual needs of students.
“All our faculty members have at least 25 years of experience, so it’s a very well-structured training body,” Krug remarks. “That’s one of our many strengths.”
Teachers receive continual professional training and support from mentors at the Faculty, who go out in the field to Maple Bear locations around the world every year, to ensure the teaching teams and schools are meeting standards with full conformity to local education regulations.
What’s more, the locally-developed Chinese curriculum enables the children to have a good command of both Chinese and English by the end of their journey in Maple Bear Hong Kong.
Global exposure via virtual interaction
The adaptive nature of Maple Bear keeps education evolving even amid the pandemic.
The school quickly developed the Maple Bear Digital Learning Community for teachers to stay connected with students in early 2020, and later became a platform for classes across different Maple Bear around the world to exchange ideas and knowledge on global initiatives.
Through the online platform, students as small as four years old have the opportunity to explore sustainability goals set up by United Nations with international counterparts, Krug explains.
Pierre Colliot, chairman of Maple Bear Hong Kong, recalls an interesting session when two kindergarten classes in Hong Kong and South Korea connected virtually and collectively worked on a project about different kinds of pollution in both regions, as well as the impacts of pollution on the world.
“That’s something we strongly believe as educators that having this kind of international exposure facilitates the kids to become citizens of the world community,” says Colliot.
Canadian education – the representation of high-quality education
Canada’s education system consistently ranks among the best in the world. According to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Canada consistently outranks the United States and the United Kingdom, often by significant margins.
Besides the world-leading bilingual education, Maple Bear adopts a student-centric approach to train the kids to be future leaders. The young learners can develop soft skills, including communication skills and critical thinking, which are essential in an ever-changing world, says Colliot.
Teachers are behind the students and work as mentors to guide the little ones to discover what to learn, instead of merely receiving content from educators, in a secure and stimulating environment where risk-taking is encouraged.
Striving to deliver bilingual education of the best quality in the city, Colliot reveals that Maple Bear Hong Kong will bring the distinctive Canadian education experience out of Tseung Kwan O to more districts, as Krug concludes: “A school transforms a community, and the community will transform the city.”
