Affordable and quality education at Kings International School

Published on Sep 10, 2017 AT MyanmarTimes Newspaper

Written by Tin (Rubynar) Yadanar Tun

With standards and expectations set out by the British National Curriculum, the STEM program and a trilingual environment, the school prepares its students in becoming top achievers

AS Myanmar’s economic situation improves with foreign direct investment gradually flowing in, international schools catering to kids of high-income parents and foreign businessmen have been sprouting up all over Yangon.

These schools, where more and more students are now enrolled, started to appear after 2012, and now there are over a dozen international schools already being opened. Choosing a truly unique school with an affordable price and good facilities is a great challenge for parents and elders.

To make things easier for them, The Myanmar Times has picked for this month’s EduCentre an excellent international school with a moderate price for everyone.

Located at 695, Maha Bandoola Street in downtown Yangon’s Latha township, Kings International School has a pre-school, a primary school and an independent International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) school. Kings International’s pre-school is suitable for Pre-Nursery kids (age 2) to Reception (ages 4-5).

The primary school is for Year 1 (age 5) to Year 7 (age 12) and the standalone IGCSE program is for Year 10 and Year 11 students wishing to sit for UK’s IGCSE exams. Vital investment in young children The emotional, social and physical development of young children has a direct impact on their overall development and growth.

The need to invest in these young children is vital as it would shape a child’s future happiness, health, growth, development and learning achievement at their school, in their family and community, and in life in general.

Neurological research shows that the early years of a child play a key role in their brain development and the first three years of life are a period of incredible growth in all areas of a baby’s development. U Ye Thiha Thant, founder and CEO of Kings International School, said,

“We started opening a pre-nursery class for 2-year-old toddlers and trained them in all necessary skills to make them outstanding and successful since their very young age.

We follow the standards and expectations set out by the British National Curriculum and include all subjects from it.

“Moreover, as a school that is based in Myanmar, we have a strong ethos to educate our students in Myanmar language up to a high level. We have high expectations of our local students to be as fluent in Myanmar language as they are in English.

This is sometimes not the case for many of the local students in international schools. “Furthermore, we also provide an opportunity for all our students to learn Chinese as a second language, as it is increasingly becoming a global language.

This immersion in trilingual environment starts from pre-school and continues all the way to the end of primary school. For example, in pre-school, we would have numeracy and literacy classes in both English and Myanmar.” Very strong foundation skills Although the results are not immediately visible at Pre-Nursery, they are very encouraging by the time the young students reach Reception and Year 1 stages. Music, ICT, sports are also part of the regular curriculum.

“By now, they have developed very strong foundation skills in all the areas of the curriculum as well as having English and Myanmar as their core languages and Chinese as the second language. They would be reading chapter books at that age, which is incredible, and their Myanmar language ability at age 5+ is at least one or two years ahead of their peer groups,” explained U Ye Thiha Thant.

“One could imagine, if they can do all these skills at such a young age, what they would be doing at age 10 or 12. At Primary School, our focus is very strong on English, Mathematics and Science. All of this is made possible because of our team of dedicated local and foreign teachers,” he said.

Kings International has also launched STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as an enrichment program beginning this summer.

“As part of this program, we will be teaching Robotics to our primary school students. This program is designed by the world-renowned Carnegie Mellon University from the United States for primary and secondary school students, and has 10 different levels that are very well structured. It is currently taught in over 10,000 schools in the United States and we are very happy to bring this to our students here.

“City College Yangon will be conducting this program in conjunction with our school. As the term STEM goes, we believe that giving students such access will really help them develop skills in this area,” U Ye Thiha Thant added. Developing a love of reading Kings International teaches phonics, an unfamiliar topic for many Myanmar parents, in pre-school. Phonics is the foundation for young children to learn how to read and develop a love of reading from a young age.

“The pre-school curriculum is based on UK’s Early Years Foundation Stage [EYFS] because Myanmar doesn’t have a comprehensive pre-school curriculum yet. The advantage of EYFS is that it is very comprehensive, very detailed and covers systematically many of the development areas of a child, and we believe that it is extremely important for our young children to have solid foundation skills,” he said.

EYFS has seven areas of learning and development: • communication and language, • physical development, • personal, social and emotional development, • literacy, • mathematics, • understanding the world, and • expressive arts and design.

“Within each of the seven areas, there are very specific standards set for the development of each child and our program has lots of experiences and activities for our children, in addition to the trilingual environment that they are growing up in,” he added.

“We use play-based learning and our program has lots of fun and interesting activities and experiences for our children to explore. Our classrooms are set up to promote creativity and curiosity while providing them a safe and friendly environment to develop their skills,” said the founder of the school.

“We have a multi-purpose court that is laid with artificial grass. It gets used a lot by our students and our pre-schoolers also have a large outdoor play, although we are based in downtown Yangon. We like to think that there is a lot of creativity happening around Kings International from pre-school to primary levels. Our classrooms and the work that our children have done, that is on display around the school, is a testament to the creativity of our children,” he added.

There are 130 students at Kings International School this year with 30 dedicated local teachers and five expatriates. Further study options “After IGCSE, most of our students embark on overseas trips for further study options. This is, sometimes, because there are not many alternatives here that will enable them to get into the best universities. We have had many of our students enter top universities, such as University of Oxford, Imperial College London, London School of Economics and Political Science and University College London.

“We work very closely with Imperial Merit Educational Advisory in helping and counseling students and their parents on overseas study options. Through counseling, we are able to inspire and get students to set high expectations and standards for themselves. We would like our students to become very successful and are prepared to do whatever we can to help them achieve this,” U Ye Thiha Thant said.

“If a student wishes to attend Myanmar schools via Kings International, we make arrangements for them to sit for the government exams. They can also sit for the government’s matriculation exam and attend the Myanmar universities,” he added.“School fees for a student will be K3 million to K6 million per year. This would be an affordable price for many parents, although we have opened Kings International at a good downtown location,” the school founder explained.

There is also a weekend Young Learners Program in which English and Chinese languages are being taught to students, from public or private schools, who are seeking to improve their skills and sit for the Cambridge Young Learners exam.

Photo: Supplied U Ye Thiha Thant, founder and CEO of Kings International School, credits the team of dedicated local and foreign teachers at his school for all the skills achieved by the students.

Programs using play-based learning at Kings International School create lots of fun, interesting activities and experiences for children to explore. Photo by Zarni Phyo