P6 students are back to the school since last week and their PSLE year is underway. For the next 9 months, these students will go through the highs and lows of their most important primary school year. They will need to juggle extra work, examinations, expectations and stress. So how Read more…
As the Chinese New Year holidays draw to a close and students return to school, preparation for the CA1 for most of my P6s and some of my P5s continue. One of the components of Paper 2, which is always tested, is English grammar MCQ. While the grammatical rules in Read more…
The examinations are over and results are beginning to stream in. How did your child do? Some parents are beaming with pride while others are becoming anxious. I can understand it. I feel it myself as a teacher. Some students have improved largely scoring well above 30 for composition when Read more…
By now, all the P6 students are hard at work preparing for the upcoming CA1. Yes, I have a number of ashen-faced students who have been mixing Chinese New Year late-night celebrations and tons of revision over the long weekend – poor things! But as I told them, its just Read more…
Over the past 9 months, I had the opportunity to work with an Indonesian student sitting for her IPSLE in Jakarta. Her mother had contacted me through my blog and asked for some private English lessons for E. To be honest, I was initially unsure if I could be of Read more…
It has been some time again since I posted but it has been busy, busy two months with the PSLE and SA2s. After the PSLE Oral, I was pleased to find out from my students that we had actually worked on the topic the Saturday before the examination. Then, for Read more…
It is the CA1 season. I know because I too, am feeling the stress of preparing my students. While everyone is knee deep in the Paper 2 components, I am always on the look out for new Stimulus-Based Conversation topics. I know from experience that the more themes we cover, Read more…
By now, all the exam papers and mark scores have been returned. As next year will be this batch of students’ PSLE year, parents can be quite concerned about how their children are scoring. The consensus that I get from students (mostly in the ‘top’ schools) is that the SA2 Read more…
In my previous post I talked about how easy it is for students to go out of point with the new format compositions. Now I will discuss how to avoid this issue. 1) Read the question and study the pictures carefully. For the P3/4 make sure that you read the Read more…
I think the phrase “Out of Point” now strikes terror in my heart when it comes to the new format primary compositions. It was not a big area of concern with the old format, unless a student did the Picture composition instead of the Continuous and even then… So lets Read more…