- My favourite activities at school
are PE,
libraries,
and maybe music.
I love my school and I've got lots of friends.
- International students can study at a Queensland government primary school
from prep through to Year 6.
Primary school allows students to have a strong support
for entering the Queensland school system.
When choosing a primary school,
a key consideration is location.
International students studying in a primary school
must live with a parent, approved relative or legal guardian.
So a family may decide a primary school based on where they would like to live,
or nearby to where an approved relative is already residing.
Whilst all EQI primary schools implement the Australian Curriculum,
one subject that does vary is the foreign language on offer.
So if you have a student that is specifically interested
in studying Italian, French,
Mandarin, or even Japanese, for instance,
you may decide on a primary school based on the language that it offers.
Depending on the student's interests,
every primary school offers different extracurricular activities.
You may find one school has stronger involvement in music,
another offers drama club,
and then another school may have afternoon sports available.
This is another way families can identify
which primary school may best suit their child.
- (ALL PLAY VIOLIN)
- Kenmore State High School provides a lot of activities
like Gala Day, Sports Carnival and Swimming Carnival,
and a lot of other activities we can choose.
So there is no limit to what we wanna do.
I just made friends and talked to them and hung out with them.
And just went to school, my English has improved.
- The longer students have been in primary school here,
the much easier the transition
into Year 7 and into the high school context.
So our international students
have access to a small support class.
And that is a year-level-based support class.
For example, all the Year 7 international students
will have a class together. And in that class,
we can work on what is their English assignment or their history assignment?
And our job then, my job, along with the EAL teacher aide job,
is to help support those students in having success.
We will proof-read their assignments, we'll help them edit their own work.
What we've found is that the more that we support the students,
the more success they will have.
By the time these students get to grade 12,
they're right up in that top band of high-performing students.
And I think that's a credit to our school and our support staff
that we can help them get to that.
- What parents are normally concerned about most
is the emotional wellbeing of their child.
That's our first priority is to have them safe and settled in the classroom,
and feeling comfortable about coming to school,
excited about learning, then the language will come.
It's amazing to see how quickly students settle and flourish under this model.
Being surrounded by a welcoming classroom teacher and students
enables the new students to make friends quickly,
which is also very important for their social and emotional wellbeing.
Children are like sponges with language acquisition
and we love to see how quickly they assimilate
and acquire their new language skills.