Academic Year 2016

The preschool returned the 2nd semester progress report on Jonathan last week and although there is improvement in him, there are many areas we need to work on it. Two of the biggest challenge remain would be Chinese and the general pronunciation on words in both languages.

Enjoying gym time

How do we work on his Chinese? Besides sending him to Berries and the constant revision from what Berries taught, I realised that there's a gap. He has very little interest and confidence in using the language to express himself. To grasp a language proficiently, we must first "HEAR" , "SPEAK" and then "WRITE". For the Chinese medium, he has not heard enough, thus how can he therefore speak and write?

Berries suggested setting a day every week as a "Chinese day". Everyone in the family must speak in Mandarin and parents must embrace the language with much enthusiasm so the child can overcome any fear. I am rolling this out soon in my family and hope to create a better learning environment for the boys.

Gourmet session

This year, he is a K-Oner. Expectation bar is raised. He is required to write in sentences and cover the first 100 high frequency words. Numeracy literal would have included simple addition and subtraction and beyond the range of 20.

1st week homework

He came back with homework at the end of week 1. The reading specialist went through with me on the homework requirement. She explained that at K1 level, the class would have to learn copying sentences from the board to the book and so this is a development milestone which most children could only hit after 1 term. In Jonathan's case, the fact he could manage to complete the high frequency words  and 1 sentence, the reading specialist remarked it was commendable because there were kids in his class that could only manage to write only 2 repeats of a high frequency word.

Since he couldn't finish his work in class, he has to complete at home (total 5 pages of work) and 2 parts of it required him to reproduce from his memory what had been discussed in class. So it is not just copying and learning to write in sentences, he is required to pay attention to class discussion and retained the information and reproduce it later on. Big jump from N2 level ah….

Berries is also giving homework at K1 level too and this weekend, we had spent significant amount of time in revision and completing homework.

What about his little brother, Matthew?

Besides acting up every day for the past week in going to school and returning from school, the small one seemed to be coping with his school work.

so different from Jon's

Matthew came back with equally amount of homework and lots of writing practice. As a N-Two-er, he needs to start writing and phonics training start this year.

Learning the "S" sound

I am happy to receive encouraging feedback from his teacher and ya, Matthew's work is so much better than his brother's messy "heck-care" attitude. But I supposed the small one picked up the skill and right attitude when I was lecturing the elder one. So if you have 2 children close in age gap, this is one big plus point you should heavily utilise. Teach 2 at the same time.

For Matt, he is a 3 year old N-Two-er so there are developmental skill that he couldn't achieve now, for example, he is still working on his right pencil grip. He's better with tracing than writing letter on his own. He also started Berries on Saturday and lucky for us, he put up minimal resistant but the feedback from Berries is similar to the elder boy, need to work on pronunciation.

Academice Year 2016 is going to be more work, more intensive and shifting gear towards preparation for Primary school.