Macau Local Geography Teaching Effective Strategy

The Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR) has already been established for ten years and meanwhile the education system of Macao has been reformed twice. Geography, as a comprehensive subject for junior school students, has inseparable relationship to the students' physical and metal development. Macao is a small city and so far we do not have comprehensive plan and direction for junior school students, therefore in the aspect of increasing our students' knowledge to Macao, we still have big progress to make and a long way to go. Under the education reform, we carried out a study by interviewing junior form students through questionnaires. This study is to understand the current situation of Macao students' learning their homeland geography.Homeland geography is to let students to put what they have learned into practice and reinforce their practical ability through knowing their living environment, thus the students can gain sustained concept of loving their homeland and even their country as well as establish correct idea towards population, resources, environment and so forth. Since Macao SAR will celebrate its 10^th anniversary of establishment this year, we take this opportunity to have a historical retrospect. It is hoped that the students can change their learning model from " subject-centered " and " knowledge-based " to "student-centered" and "life-based" .We adopt junior form students as the interviewed subjects for junior form students are the teaching subjects among most teaching outlines throughout the world. Moreover, students' interest towards geography is cultivated from junior form. The results show that Macao's homeland geography has deviations in teaching content and teaching method at different levels, especially the teaching content and method are far different from our daily life. Students' knowledge towards their homeland is not in-depth. Therefore, we put forward three principles: 1. Student-centered principle 2. Daily life principle 3. Timely teaching content. Based on these principles, teachers should improve their teaching content and method so as to let students have "real life" learning.