About City Kids

Since 1979, Hong Kong Preschool Playgroup Association has been providing developmentally appropriate play-based early childhood education for families in Hong Kong. This year City Kids HKPPA Playgroup (formally known as HKPPA Parent & Toddler, Borrett Road) will celebrate it's 30th year of providing opportunities for toddlers and parents to come together in play and friendship. City Kids HKPPA Preschool (formally known as City Kidz) is HKPPA's flagship kindergarten, founded in 1994 in response to Mid-level parents' demands for a high-quality English medium preschool that would serve as the crucial stepping stone for primary school. 

Our primary mission is to nurture students' innate curiosity and lay the foundation for a lifelong love of learning. We share the following aspiration for children: 

To grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body, and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society. (New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum) 

We value the precious time of childhood and believe that children who have the opportunity to develop strong self-concepts and social and emotional skills are most successful both in school and later in life. Teachers, children, and parents all play important roles in the educational process. 

Our educational philosophy is based on Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP). These practices include programs that promote children's active exploration of the environment so that children have the opportunity to explore, reflect, interact and communicate with other children and adults. DAP encourages a mixture of teacher-directed and child-directed activities. We use varied instructional strategies to meet the individual learning needs of children, and furthermore, we understand that the direction and speed of learning and growing will often fluctuate from day to day, according to where the child is and the people they are with (New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum). 

Our aims and outcomes for toddlers and preschool children:

• increasing independence
• growing sense of self-identity and of self as learner
• increasing emotional robustness and sense of control
• growing consistency and predictability of behaviour and response
• increasing ability to cope with change
• increasing ability to cope with delay in having needs met
• developing memory capacity and sense of past, present, and future
• widening social interaction, and development of a sense of others
• increasing awareness of the world, and ability to share interests with others
• increasing competence with techniques for communication and with tools for symbolising and representing
• growing control of body and physical co-ordination
• expanding experiences and understanding of people, places, events, and things
• acquisition of domain-specific knowledge
• increasing ability to use logic and abstract thinking (New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum)