Manulife Charitable Foundation |  Activities |  Person-in-charge   [ 中文 ]

Manulife Charitable Foundation

Manulife Charitable Foundation is a non-profit making organization incorporated in Hong Kong with limited liabilities in December 1998 by Manulife (International) Limited, a leading provider of financial protection and wealth management products in Hong Kong and Macau. Registered with the Inland Revenue Department as a charitable organization in Hong Kong, the Foundation can generate and donate funds to support and promote educational, health and charitable activities for the wellbeing of the community.

Background information

To contribute to the future success of our society, Manulife is committed to investing in our most important future asset youth. This commitment has led to the establishment of Manulife Centre for Children with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD), located at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

SLD is not intelligence related problem. Many children with SLD are gifted with special talents in music, sports and arts. They encounter difficulties in reading, writing and/or language comprehension due to brain or cognitive dysfunction. These difficulties can be overcome with proper learning strategies if the problems are detected and addressed early.

Our Mission

The centre sees its mission as taking a leading role in the holistic development of children with SLD in Hong Kong, through providing academic and professional services such as preliminary learning capability assessment, training and counseling. The Centre sets the following objectives for itself:

• To research and develop programs and tools aiming to enhance the learning effectiveness and to ascertain the multifaceted potentials of children with SLD

• To provide various skills training for children with SLD and their parents, and also professional development training for teachers and frontline workers.

• To be a locally acknowledged and internationally recognised centre for the development of children with SLD

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Activities

Seminars

Manulife Centre for Children with Specific Learning Disabilities will offer open seminars about children development and learning difficulties with the public free of charge in April, July and December respectively.

Children's Day Camp

The Children's Day Camp will be held during the Summer and Christmas holiday periods. Our camp activities aim to identify our children's potential, give them a pleasurable and successful learning experience, and cultivate among them positive attitudes to the challenges in learning. The camp can accommodate 40 to 60 elementary school students to participate. During the three-day camp, children will participate in activities such as evaluation of learning abilities, visits, workshops on study skills, socio-emotional skills, and activities of creative and performing arts.

A follow-up parent workshop will be held after each children day camp. From the workshop, parents can learn about their children's performances in the camp and the results from the evaluation of learning abilities. There will be sharing on strategies and issues with regard to parent-child communication and helping children develop better learning skills. Parents will also have the opportunity to share their experiences with other participants and gain mutual support.

Family Support Programme for Chinese and English Literacy Enhancement for Students with Learning Disabilities

Development of Self-regulated Strategy for Improving Academic Achievement

The children with learning disabilities often need explicit instruction to make improvements. The current program aims at promoting the learning effectiveness children with LD by
　

1) enhancing children’s fundamental awareness and skills underlying learning of Chinese, English and Mathematics,

2) setting up instructional goals and strategies through collaborative efforts of parents and instructors in conducting curriculum-based measurement (CBM) of the child, and

3) constantly revising the instructional strategies by observing the child’s responses-to-instructions (RTI).

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Person-in-charge

Dr. Alice Cheng Lai

Dr. Lai was educated at National Taiwan Normal University (BA), Michigan State University (MA) and Hong Kong University (PhD). She is the Associate Professor in Applied and Educational Psychology, Person-in-charge of Manulife Centre for Children with Specific Learning Disabilities in the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Director of  PolyU- Peking U Joint Centre for Child Development and Learning in Peking University, Beijing PRC. 

Dr. Lai has been conducting research into Attention- Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD) and children with Chinese developmental dyslexia and specific learning disabilities for the last 20 years in Hong Kong and Beijing PRC. Her areas of interest include identification and intervention of children with AD/HD and at risk for school failure and dyslexia and other specific learning disabilities and how AD/HD and dyslexia are best addressed in Chinese-speaking communities in China and other Chinese speaking communities around the world. She was presented with the President’s Awards for Achievement (Overall Achievement), in all areas, of academic work in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

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Room HJ201, The Department of Applied Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong.   

Tel: 2766 6313    Fax:2364 5514    e-mail: info@mccsld.org    web-site: www.mccsld.org