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PSLE English Workshop for Parents – How to Tackle The English Paper

This is not an Adult English Course, in case you are wondering. It is more of a crash course in understanding how to tackle the English Language Paper in PSLE. All of us were there to learn tips and how to teach our children. Some parents were more interested in knowing how to obtain A* for the paper, some wanted cheat sheets that the private tuition centres have and school teachers do not, and for me, I want to learn as much as I can and incorporate into our daily 30 min revision of English with my Missy 12. I am there to absorb knowledge and learn how to teach, not so much as to obtain A*.

Spanning over 2 Saturdays of 6 hours each, the parents, including me, who attended the Marshall Cavendish Education PSLE English Workshop for Parents certainly wasted no time in learning.. PSLE English!

This is not an Adult English Course, in case you are wondering. It is more of a crash course in understanding how to tackle the English Language Paper in PSLE. All of us were there to learn tips and pass our takeaways to our children. Some parents were more interested in knowing how to obtain A* for the paper, some wanted cheat sheets that the private tuition centres have and school teachers do not, and for me, I want to learn as much as I can and incorporate into our daily 30 min revision of English with my Missy 12. I am there to absorb knowledge and learn how to teach, not so much as to obtain A*.

I think for many of us, we came out from the workshop feeling that we had squeezed the trainer all his possible knowledge in the PSLE English paper. The best part is, the trainer was super accommodating and selfless in sharing his tips and such. All in all, for me, I have learnt lots in the 12 hours of workshop!

The trainer is Joel Lim, who had conducted an enjoyable workshop for my Missy 12 a couple of weeks back in the PSLE English Workshop for Student. You may read about what she learnt in this post.

We learnt about the format of the English paper and weightage of marks, Comprehension, Letter-writing, Situational writing, Essays, Synthesis and Transformation, Comprehension Cloze, Oral, Listening Comprehension and many other details to look out for when attempting the English paper. Joel gave a very good advice before we started the workshop proper:

Listen to your child more, and Speak Less.

How true and what a timely reminder! Often, we fail to LISTEN attentively to our child when they talk, and more often than not, I find my voice filling the air from the moment I come home from work till they sleep. It certainly does not seem healthy!

Now, let’s see what we have learnt in each segment in the English language paper.

On Composition

Joel taught us Composition tactics. He shared to us from the examiner’s point of view when reading and marking a composition. Not only that, he printed examples of composition from a weak writer, an average writer and a strong writer. In the class, he analysed the writing skills and trademarks of different kinds of writers. This certainly helps me greatly in teaching my girl what to look out for and how not to fall into these pit holes. I shall be sharing more on what I have learnt from the workshop in my PSLE Series on Composition writing soon.

On Comprehension

He used a past PSLE Comprehension Passage and taught us the steps in tackling it:
1) Read the passage (and read again for a second time)
2) Annotation
3) Ask Questions and Answer them in your head
4) Complete Questions

He drew arrows on the passage and explained to us how he infers and asks questions in his head when reading the passage carefully. It may seem tedious but I find it very useful to teach my Missy 12 with the details of going through word by word, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence. I believe with sufficient practices, she will get into the habit of ‘Inferencing’ and able to answer questions more confidently.

On Synthesis and Transformation

We were recommended some good assessment books and it is really up to individual to review if these books suit the styles of your child. Joel went through the following book on Synthesis and Transformation which I immediately went to buy from Popular bookstore. I find the layout of the book helpful in presenting transformed words in table form, and addressing some difficult ones like “who and whom” usage in synthesis. Do check this out and see if it suits your child.

One thing we learnt is that for Synthesis and Transformation questions, there are no half marks and hence, either your child get full 2 marks or he/she will get zero mark even for a missing word. Thus, practicing more questions is probably the key to tackling this segment.

On Comprehension Cloze

We briefly touched on this and Joel had shared the following pointers from again another “My Friend Has Diarrhea” kind of abbreviations for easy remembrance: Round Aunty Farts Chocolate Rainbows!
Round – Read once first to get background information
Aunty – Annotate: summarise, drawing arrows to relate, asking questions and answering them
Farts – Fill in the blanks with as many words as you can think of in pencil
Chocolate – Choose the best answer for each question
Rainbows – Read again, use instinct to judge appropriateness of answers

Well, there are quite many ways that I have learnt on tackling Comprehension Cloze from various sources. Hence, I shall similarly share on my PSLE Series blog posts with one on tackling the Comprehension Cloze. Stay tune!

On Oral and Listening Comprehension

Joel recommended another good book for this segment. I really emphathize with our children these days. Even something so simple and easy to score like ‘Listening Comprehension’ and ‘Oral’ need strategies and a dedicated assessment book for them. I remembered we had never needed to prepare for them during our PSLE times! But, now, the PSLE standard has up many notches and Oral is really similar to an interview session in my opinion. Perhaps, if I were to take the PSLE Oral, I may not get good marks too since I tend to stutter or tongue-tied at impromptu questions, especially if the topic is not so much of my interest!

Do spend some time to go to Popular Bookstore to hunt for this book and read the tips given. I find that some are quite common sense and some are really good tips. But given the limited time, I would not be able to prepare my girl much for Oral and Listening Comprehension. Maybe, I should start prepping her during our conversations on bus rides to get her used to speaking and quick thinking.

Apart from sharing tips and tricks on all the English Paper sections, Joel is very kind to share his own resources on “Commonly Mis-spelt words” and Synthesis and Transformation Rules table among other things. We could feel that he understood why we would drop all schedule to spend 2 Saturdays learning from him. And he genuinely wanted to help us parents to help our own children.

After his workshop, I tested out the tips on my girl and for the first time, seriously, she answered 8 questions in a top school Comprehension passage correctly! While I am not expecting miracles, I can tell that my girl is gaining confidence in doing her English paper. By and by, I am sure we will get there!

Marshall Cavendish has 1 more Parent Workshop in this series:
PSLE Math Workshop For Parents
Date: 1 & 8 April (2 Saturdays in total)
Venue: Times Centre
Time: 9am – 430pm
Fees: $180

Do check out the website for more information and upcoming workshops.
I have a timetable here on the upcoming ones for your reference:

Disclaimer: I was invited to attend the Marshall Cavendish Education PSLE English Workshop for Parents. Thank you MCE and PR company for the chance to learn and teach my children. I strongly recommend concerned parents to attend MCE Workshops which I really benefited a lot!

PSLE Series – How We Learn English

I must admit that Primary School English these days is so much more difficult than what we learnt in our own Primary School years. We never had Comprehension Cloze! We never had Editing! We never learn the word “Prospectus” and whatever is that? We only know MCQs, Comprehension, perhaps some fill in the blanks but with helping words and we only know the word “Leaflet”.

I must admit that Primary School English these days is so much more difficult than what we learnt in our own Primary School years. We never had Comprehension Cloze! We never had Editing! We never learn the word “Prospectus” and whatever is that? We only know MCQs, Comprehension, perhaps some fill in the blanks but with helping words and we only know the word “Leaflet“.

If my own English is not good enough to score a Primary 6 Exam Paper, how do I teach this subject to my girl, especially when we have no tuition?

I am currently learning along with my kids whenever I teach them on this subject. I feel that I am re-learning English all over again and I am appreciating the specific usage of tenses, and even simple things like punctuation! I find myself flipping through the dictionary often and explaining the meaning to Missy 12, sometimes in Chinese. Apparently my Chinese is better than English by a great margin. Maybe because Chinese is so much more straightforward without complicated Grammar rules and phrasal verbs. I feel so paralyzed by my lack of English vocabulary words that I regret tremendously not having read enough books when I was young.

Hence, my number one advice in learning English is really to READ MORE BOOKS! No hard and fast formula, just READ, READ and READ!

Kel and I decided to devise an English learning plan for Missy 12 starting from January this year. It is kind of late and we get interrupted on our schedule due to the intensive volleyball training that sees my girl returning late and tired. I have yet to see results since there is only one school test so far, which is taking place as I type. But I have certainly put more ticks than crosses on Missy 12’s English assessment book lately, and that has been encouraging enough to raise her confidence.

I will be elaborating on a few methods that are shared by kind friends and even strangers. Although some are not yet tried and tested on my girl yet, I would still wish to share with you as maybe some of you are struggling like us on doing a crash course on English and would not be able to wait for our verdict at the end of the year. I would suggest that if you do use these methods, please DO NOT bet 100% on them to create miracles over a short time. You can, of course, use them as a guide or try them out on your own, or tweak them to suit your child’s learning ways as you wish.

Our Daily 30 minutes English Revision

I use the Longman Mastering English Grammar & Vocabulary book recommended by a good friend (The picture below from Google image shows Hodder Education, but it is the same. Popular Bookstore is selling Longman publisher). It is separated by topics and each topic has exercises to test the understanding of the student. I also bought a Complete Practice Book for Grammar, Vocabulary & Comprehension to help me test my girl’s understanding of what was taught.

First of all, I assign each topic, for example, Nouns, to be taught by me in one week. Then once the topic on Nouns is completed, we concentrate on the Complete Practice book on the second week on the same topic, Nouns. Hence, this is a 2 weeks block for each topic. If the topic needs more time, for example, on Tenses, then it will be 2 weeks teaching, 2 weeks practices.

Secondly, I prep my girl that we will have daily 30 minutes of English revision. I emphasized that it will only be 30 minutes and not more than that, hence, she should be able to give full concentration during these 30 minutes. I find that prepping her on this revision plan helps greatly. Both of us know that it will only be 30 minutes and not more or less, as compared to a stretchable time period that may see both of us losing concentration and patience.

On the first week
For the first 15 minutes, I will be teaching a topic on Grammar and once 15 minutes is up, I will stop teaching.
For the next 15 minutes, she will start doing exercises in the Longman book for 10 minutes and final 5 minutes will be marking and explaining mistakes.

On the second week
For the first 15 minutes, Missy 12 will do as many exercises as she can on the Complete Practice book.
For the next 15 minutes, I will mark and go through the mistakes with her.

The above is our lesson plan for English revision. Both of us are surprised at how fast 30 minutes pass us by and the real challenge is calling it a day after 30 minutes! I have to stop my urge to continue beyond that but since I have promised that it will be a 30 minute revision, I have to keep to it.

So far, apart from some interrupted schedule like Chinese New Year break and days that she returned late and too tired for any revision, it has been working out fine for us. I can also see her improvement in understanding the topic more in depth. This is certainly better compared to my previous way of assigning numerous practices for her to do in the afternoon while I was at work and then marking the practices and explaining to her on another day. She has given feedback that she understands English Grammar better now than previously blindly doing assessment books.

Tackling Comprehension Cloze

This method is with courtesy from a close friend.
I learnt that most students fail this section badly, and perhaps including me too! There are no helping words and unless you read newspapers regularly and read widely, chances are the students will have no clue on what words to fill in.

Tips: I learnt that for each word to be filled up, there will be clues around the word to hint at the right answer. Although this is not always the case as some are phrasal verbs, this method can still be applied for most of the words. You can find these clues in 1-2 sentences before or after the word.
Below are some clues that I have tried to find with my girl. For example: the highlighted words are clue to the blank word, like “read and write” hints to you that the blank is “school“, “determination” hints that the earlier word is “determined“, “raked the ground” and “harvesting” hint that the next answer is “planting” the seeds.

Memorizing Method

This method is shared by a stranger whom I had a chance to learn an unorthodox way of crash course English. I have not tried this method yet, but it seems a possible approach when one is running out of time. Do let me know what you think of this method!

Since we are talking about running out of time to clam all English words into the brain of a 12 yo, memorizing answers on practice papers may be a good way for some students. Basically, for all MCQs on English Vocabulary or Grammar options on practice papers (In this case, we bought the English set of practice papers called “Primary 6 English Exam Package by PhD Education” from Popular but have yet to try it out), parents can highlight the right word option in yellow and write down the meaning of the word beside the right word. So, that means that Parents have to be diligent to DO the practice paper for the child! For the rest of the wrong words, the stranger shared that there will be NO TIME to go through them and those will not need to pay attention to. In fact, highlighting in yellow aids the child to remember better and whenever the child comes across the same sentence or similar phrase, he or she will be remembering that this “Right Word” will go hand in hand with these words before and after. Whoa! Does this even make sense?

Now before you go all out to dismiss this unorthodox method, let me share a success story of a Korean family whose son joined his Secondary 1 class in June, half way into the academic year for the first time in Singapore. Everyday, his stay home mother would spend time to underline words in a comprehension passage or books that she thought her son did not know and write down the meaning of the word in a separate notebook. When the father came back from work, he would spend time going through these words and his son would re-read and memorize till he understood the words and sentences. This went on for 3 months before the son took his first English examination. Guess what? He did it well enough to move on to Sec 2! This is from a boy who did not know much English to taking English medium classes and passing an English Exam within 3 months period!

So perhaps this unorthodox method may help for some.

Composition

My girl attended the Marshall Cavendish Education PSLE English Workshop for students. They shared about plot twists and My “Friend Has Diarrhea” way of concluding plus some Synthesis tips. I shall not repeat them here. You may check out the post here for what she had learnt and happily applied to her recent Composition Test.

That’s all for my sharing of teaching and learning English at home. Do you have tips and ideas on tackling the English Paper? Please, please share with me and all other readers so that we can learn from each other!

Disclaimer: These methods are not meant to be in any way official guides to learning English. Some are tried and tested and some are not. Some methods may work for me but may not work for you. I do hope that by sharing some of the methods that I have heard and used or not used, some parents out there may find them beneficial for their children. I really welcome comments and even your own tips, so that whoever reads this post, is able to learn and hopefully take away some positive ideas 🙂

The Start of PSLE Preparations From A Mum Who Insists On NO TUITION

I have wanted to title this as “The Start of PSLE Preparations From The Laid-Back Mum”. But I am not exactly so laid-back anymore after my girl, Missy 12, failed her Math in P3. I cannot label myself as laid-back since I do teach and revise with my kids one month before examinations. In comparison with most parents, I have done very minimal for my kids’ academic. There is one thing I have stick to my guns and am crossing my fingers that I am doing a right thing, is to insist on not sending my kids to tuition.

This year, Missy 12 is taking PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examinations), her first National Examination at a tender age of 12. I am not going to lament why the need for PSLE and why can’t kids just move on to Secondary school without going through such major stress. This post is about how we are going to revise for PSLE on our own, free of external tuition.

If there are tuition centres for parents to teach techniques in answering English Comprehension Cloze, Comprehension, Science open-ended questions, Chinese Comprehension and Composition tips, you bet, I will sign up for it. I will gladly use my time to learn and go back to teach Missy 12, so as to save her time. Perhaps I am unaware of any. So please let me know if you know of one ok?

I must admit that tuition centres or private tuition teachers have bags of tricks and techniques to teach students on how to answer questions. That is the major advantage of going for tuition classes. So by denying my girl to go to such sure-win classes, many have question about my sanity and label me as a stubborn bull. To speak the truth, I am scared too.

Should I stop Missy 12’s new piano classes now (she has recently asked to resume her piano class after 1.5 years of break) when everyone is doing the opposite by taking a year break from any kind of enrichment classes? Should I invest $100+ per lesson to give her a booster in English? Should I ignore her tiredness from 3 times a week of intensive Volleyball training and insist she go to 1.5 hours of tuition multiply by 2 or 3 subjects every week plus 1 hour travelling time back and forth? Or perhaps others may ask why is she still playing sports and going for NAFA art classes during this crucial year?

There are various reasons why I do not send her to tuition classes and why she is still continuing enrichment classes.

FATIGUE PREVENTS OPTIMAL LEARNING

Firstly, she has never attended a single tuition class and forcing her to do it now may backfire her learning interest. If she cannot catch what is taught in class, she may not catch it in another tuition class. Switching off when one has lost interest and simply too tired could happen to anyone. Besides travelling on the road to and fro tuition will deplete all her energy and attention needed in the class.

TRUST IN SCHOOL TEACHERS

Secondly, I believe our MOE-trained school teachers are very qualified to teach the students good enough to do well in PSLE. If not, shouldn’t we send our kids to tuition classes instead and skip school entirely?

STRIKING A BALANCE

Thirdly, I believe in BALANCE. I want my girl to be happy and learn holistically. I worry about her stress levels this year.

On the first day of school, her form teacher wrote down the test and exam schedule from Jan to Sep. I can feel that the teachers have started to emphasize to the students on how critical this year is, and have no reservations in instilling the awareness and stress in them. I am not so sure if Missy 12 feels the stress, but I took a picture of what she jotted down on this schedule and I couldn’t take my eyes off the snapshot of the schedule the next day. I am determined to “wake up” from my laid-back self and do my best to ensure she does reasonably well. It will still be only Mom Tuition and no external tuition. At the same time, I am also determined to balance her stress and ensure she still has a life. So, her piano and art classes and volleyball practices are forms of de-stress in my opinion and should not stop. I will respect her if, at any point of time, she thinks she wants to stop any of them. So far, she has not raised a flag.

REVISION PLANS

Ever since I saw the Jan to Sep exam schedule, I have gone to the Popular bookstore to buy more assessment books. I had chanced upon a parent who taught an unorthodox method to improve English in a short time. I had talked to several mums whose kids have been through PSLE. I have talked to teacher friends. Finally I discussed all my findings and thoughts with Kel.

We came out with a timetable for revision. We worked out how to settle the other 2 kids when I am teaching my girl. We put up a revision plan and teaching method for English, the weakest subject. I shall share details on how we go about revising in another post.

Each weeknight, we will have 30 minutes revision time for English. You may think it is very short. However, I am a working mum. Night time is short and precious. Energy is low, attention span is short. My girl returns late on 4 weekdays in a week from school’s commitment. She will need time to rest and do her homework. She may have questions that need my help to teach her too. Some time has to be catered to that.

Every weekend, we will have 2 parts of revision according to our weekend schedule. First part will be an hour’s revision and second part will be an hour and a half. Saturday will be focusing on Math and Sunday will be on Science.

That leaves Chinese out of the whole revision plan. Chinese is our kids’ strongest subject and it really helps to free up time for the rest of the subjects. It is hard to achieve bilingual excellence. While Chinese is their strongest subject, naturally, English becomes the weaker one. The reason why Chinese is a stronger subject is because we are a Chinese speaking family and my kids watch Channel 8 drama serials, listen to Chinese radio station and Chinese songs. Even though they do not have too much problem with Chinese, they still need to brush up compositions and get the right technique to answering Chinese Comprehension questions.

CHANGE OF ROUTINES TO PREP PSLE

Some routines will have to change a bit.

Sleeping early

This is a really difficult routine to change. Perhaps with one child, I may be able to enforce this with breeze since there are no toddler who runs in and out of the room before bed and no sibling to chat and giggle with long after lights out. I told Missy 12 that a simple way to help her do well in academic is to sleep early, as simple as that. A clear mind is like an empty sponge. It absorbs knowledge faster and allows one to think better. We are trying to have a lights out by 930pm.

No night TV

The kids love to watch the Chinese Drama serial at 9pm to 10pm. This will have to stop. I do allow them to have an hour of TV time in the day time once they have finished their homework.

Less weekend activities

This year, we may have to cut down on our weekend activities for the sake of Missy 12’s critical year. She has lots of homework from Friday school and has started to ask for more time to do homework. The first time she asked for homework time, I was slightly taken aback. The kids are growing up and school work is mounting. I have since cut down on blog events and ensure homework is done before we bring them out. Nevertheless, I will balance revision time with play. Moderating stress is my priority too.

Other siblings

So what do the other 2 kids do when I am revising with my Missy 12? I have decided to task Master 10 to play with Master 5. It works sometimes and it poses great challenges on other times. Master 5 yearns for attention after not seeing me for the whole day. I have even thought of the convenient way of giving the ipad so that he can quietly watch some YouTube videos and I can have some peaceful serious revision time. If you have good ideas on how to handle the other kids, do help me on this too!

To prepare for PSLE which is taking place in September, I will most likely take up lesser blog commitment and cut down on my girl night dates. It is indeed a family examination since everyone in the house has to change routine and adjust in one way or another to give moral support. I will be blogging more on PSLE preparation and my experience on it as we go along. I hope our revision plan works and who knows, I may really send my girl to intensive tuition if nothing works out!

I welcome PSLE mums to drop a comment below or on facebook page to exchange ideas and advice. Thank you in advance!

Till the next PSLE post!

Chek Jawa Guided Tour in Pulau Ubin – a living classroom

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Chek Jawa Guided Tour is a tour that you must exercise kiasu-ism when you do booking. When I did my booking for June guided tour, I put a reminder on my calendar as early as January to remind myself to book on 1 March, the date when booking for June opens! It is very popular especially on dates that suited us in June holidays. Mind you, there are limited dates for these tours, so you really have to plan well. If you wish to check out booking and guided tour dates, click here.

On the day of the tour, we met my BFF family at 7am at Changi Jetty. It was rare for our kids to wake up so early and we were rewarded with sighting this beautiful sunrise!

We took the boat from Changi Jetty that sits maximum 12 pax, with each paying $3 for the ride to Pulau Ubin.

The ride was about 10 minutes and when we had reached the Pulau Ubin Jetty, we took a van to Chek Jawa. We have to pre-book the van prior to our trip (Scroll to the end for all the details and cost for the tour). The van could accommodate all 15 of us, 8 adults and 7 kids. The van ride took about 10 minutes to Chek Jawa and we had to get down and walk a 100m stretch of road to the information kiosk, the meeting point where we met our tour guide from Nparks.

There were a few more tour groups, each with its own tour guide. The tour guides are volunteers and I thought they are really doing a good thing to volunteer their time to educate us on the ecosystem of Chek Jawa. We were very lucky to have our tour guide who was very patient to answer the kids’ questions and very knowledgeable on Chek Jawa. His instructions and explanation were very clear and shared lots of analogies in simple terms to help us understand the flora and fauna.

Before we started the tour, our tour guide prep us with a few instructions:

Go to toilet before we start as there will not be a washroom until we return to the information kiosk 2 hours later.
Apply mosquito repellent before we start the tour
Do not shout or scream when you see the little creatures like crabs, mudskippers, etc, as they are shy and might go into hiding, leaving the groups behind to see less of them.

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Chinese Show and Tell Camp – KidStartNow

{Sponsored Review}

This June holidays, I had planned a series of activities for the children. The very first one is KidStartNow Show and Tell Camp for my 8yo boy. If you do remember that 2 years ago, he also attended Chinese enrichment holiday classes at the very same centre and the experience was a very enjoyable one. And 2 years later, when he was invited for this 4 day Show and Tell camp, I was a little skeptical about whether he would enjoy as much now that he is older. Nowadays for any media invite, sponsored classes, I would have to ask the kids if they would like to attend. Kids have grown up and they need to have a say in what they are attending right? So when my boy heard that he would be taught by HongMei laoshi again, he was ecstatic and agreed immediately. Wow! I didn’t know a short 4 day camp 2 years back can have such positive impression on this boy.

As before, my boy received an invitation card prior to the day he went for the camp which is always a pleasant surprise. Which kid does not like an invitation mailed to him?

This time the class was held in the newly open branch at Bedok Central. I was impressed by the interior design of the centre which has a Super Hero Panda theme. The panda theme is also the theme for the classes. Yes, the classes have a theme, so, it engages the kids well.

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