Learning at an ACE School

I recently came across a clipping from the 80s, a report I did for the local newspaper, the Otago Daily Times. I was working as an assistant pastor at the Assembly of God church in Dunedin at that time, and the church had opened an ACE School for its children. ACE : Accelerated Christian Education. This brief report on how the children learned gives some idea of their daily work.  

At one Dunedin school the pupils decide how much work they are going to do each day.

Children attending the Assembly of God Christian School, in South Dunedin, set their own goals by writing down how many pages of work they expect to complete each day.

They learn five subjects and if they do not complete the amount of work they set themselves then they have to finish it at home that night.

Most of the time, however, they get through this work in about two hours, and that leaves the rest of the day for sport, art, reading and writing stories, music and projects.

Children work at their own pace: in fact their workbooks are called Paces.

That means they do not have to worry about someone else being able to do their maths faster than them, and they do not need to worry if other children can spell better.

Each child works through a few pages out of each of their five Paces each day – when these are revision Paces, the children find they can go faster if they want.

There are five core subjects; English and word-building (which work on spelling and grammar), science, social studies, and maths.

The children may have to do two or three tests every two weeks and will be expected to get at least 80 percent in each test, or else do the whole Pace again.

The good news is that children have every chance of success if they did the work throughout the Pace in a careful way.

In fact, it is normal for the children to get more than 90 percent regularly – often 100 percent – and very rare that they have to repeat a Pace.

The children even correct their own work, most of the time, from special answer books, and cannot go on until each section is right.

You might think that it would be easy to cheat, but remember when children do a test they have to know the work – or repeat it!

What does the teacher do during all this time?

She is kept very busy: even though most of the work is explained in the Pace, the children still need to read sections of their Paces aloud to the teacher, and to  have help with things they do not understand.

Photo courtesy of Mikasa Schools