Sadong Primary School in Sadong District, Pyongyang, is well-known for its extracurricular group activities.
At the beginning the school had only two groups for mathematics and football.
In the spring of 2020, Choe Chol Nam, headmaster of the school, expressed his intention to expand the groups, saying that it was necessary for the school to run them properly so that students could possess a wide range of knowledge.
Since then, more than 10 groups have been added for table tennis, swimming, accordion, vocal music and foreign languages.
Kim Sol Hyang, a group member, said that her group members gather in the nature study room in the afternoon after school to conduct experiments on air, seawater and wind, adding that this gives them a better understanding of the principles of nature, matters and phenomena.
It happened in the initial days of the table tennis group.
The instructor found that as the time went by, students felt tedious and distracted while in training.
He steadily adopted new instructing methods suited to the physical constitution and psychology of primary school children and continued to study how to combine various special techniques for them.
On the other hand, he employed visual aids and videos to help students develop active thinking power, building up their capacity to play games and control their psychology.
As a result, the students came to possess special skills to cope with the changing situation, ending up winning the table tennis event at the Pyongyang Municipal Sports Class Games-2024 held in May.
By intensifying basic education, members of the football and swimming groups took the first place in the contests held in the city last year.
The accordion and vocal music groups teach the students rudiments of hearing, rhythm, singing posture, pronunciation, breathing and sight reading, training them to be promising soloists and vocalists.
Written by Mangjol Sang-Hoon, Chongro Ministry of Education
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