*Highlight P6 syllabus & Exam techniques
*Lessons on 6A textbook (emphasis on important vocabulary words)
*Teaching of composition through computer usage
*Oral Techniques through webcam and videos
Objective of Holiday Intensive Program: To create an awareness of the rigorous P6 syllabus to prepare for PSLE. This will cause the students to be more alert when school reopen. Starting early in preparation will mean allowing students to set their individual targets for Chinese. After the whole program, each student will be briefed on their present linguistic level of Chinese and how far are they from the targets.
2.12.12
O level Preparation
-Cover Exam Syllabus (sec 1 to 3)
-Newspaper readings and further research on omy website: http://www.omy.sg/- a news portal website likened to stomp that has videos, pictures to supplement important news reports.
-Lessons drawn: how to get the main gist from huge chunks of texts, selecting good phrases for composition or "default" news phrases for the purpose of cloze passage. How to pronounce and articulate difficult words in preparation for oral exam.
-Oral, Compre and Compo techniques
26.11.12
Ryan who got an A for PSLE Chinese has worked hard to achieve his remarkable T-score. Indeed, this is another testimony that sheer hard work is able to overcome shortcomings for Chinese language. As introduced in my earlier posts, Ryan is a rather soft-spoken boy who comes from a English-speaking family. When he came in to sign up for tuition in June, I originally thought that there is too short a time to teach to raise his score and if i would succeed, it will only be to 65. But Ryan prove to be a different student. He is obedient, diligient and motivated. Although he also has his playful side sometimes, when you tell him to get back to work he will do as so. He improved from 50 to 65 during prelims before securing the A. Oral component is especially challenging for him who speaks Chinese with a weird intonation. But he overcame the odds by doggedly doing what I say. Everyday he will read some passages and record his voice so as to detect his mispronunciations. By practicing numerous times upon his mistakes, he was definitely confident during the day of the oral exam which gave his grade a push towards A.
Qian Xi, a studious girl, was searching for a right tuition to help her fill her missing gap in Chinese. She enrolled in one of the commercial composition classes but found out that the dry lessons did not aid in her improvement. She joined also in the period of june and in the last three months leading to her PSLE exam she opted for 1-to-1 individual tuition to enhance the effectiveness.She saw her fruits of labour early during the prelims where she scored 74 marks before proceeding to grab an A. She also has a very positive learning attitude motivated by the fact that she has already decided which school to go. She expects a lot from herself and thus it is this attitude that produces this good result.
Giacomo (Zhi Ming) is a half-Italian studentComposition, her weakest component became better due to continuous effort to commit important,appealing phrases to memory. During the crucial few weeks before exam, i added extra lessons up to 4 per week. He did not lament of tiredness. He persisted on. For Zhi Ming, comprehension and listening comprehension are huge challenges. He is a diligent boy but he is not as hardworking as Ryan and Qian Xi. What i meant by that is that he does he is hardworking to do the intensive bare minimum but has not reached such hunger for success to go the extra mile and practice on his own. he has the potential to score A but has not really breakthrough because of his weak foundation in the language.
For this year's batch of PSLE students, those who achieved A despite joining the tuition at a later time, have high self-expectations which drive them to work extremely hard. They are the one who are willing to carry out daunting yet important preparation work such as going for extra lessons, memorising good vocabulary words and practicing oral exam. The majority which got B are relatively as weak yet playful and not motivated. Although i can choose to give up on them whenever they crossed the line and takes learning lightly, I have the obligation to continue teaching them even if it means knowing they are not going to score well. If i did not continue teaching, they will give up on themselves and Chinese have gotten worse. Don't I feel disappointed that so many are getting B? Well, definitely but fortunately i take comfort in that almost all the parents are actually quite satisfied with their child's chinese grade. for the weak students, they were expecting that they might even fail Chinese. For these students, it is time to re-build their foundation to prevent history from repeating itself in secondary school.
For this year's batch of PSLE students, those who achieved A despite joining the tuition at a later time, have high self-expectations which drive them to work extremely hard. They are the one who are willing to carry out daunting yet important preparation work such as going for extra lessons, memorising good vocabulary words and practicing oral exam. The majority which got B are relatively as weak yet playful and not motivated. Although i can choose to give up on them whenever they crossed the line and takes learning lightly, I have the obligation to continue teaching them even if it means knowing they are not going to score well. If i did not continue teaching, they will give up on themselves and Chinese have gotten worse. Don't I feel disappointed that so many are getting B? Well, definitely but fortunately i take comfort in that almost all the parents are actually quite satisfied with their child's chinese grade. for the weak students, they were expecting that they might even fail Chinese. For these students, it is time to re-build their foundation to prevent history from repeating itself in secondary school.
16.11.12
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PSLE 2012 Composition
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Helping words:
水沟 指着 大布袋
漂浮 水流得急 大声喊救
General Description: One rainy day,there were two students sharing an umberalla and they came across a canal.The canal was flooded with the ferocious rain and from a distance, a crowd has gathered and they were pointing at a particular big black bag floating along. In no time, the two boys jumped in and tried to reach for it but they struggled and appeared to be drowning.
Balestier Hill Pri Sch
He joined my tuition class from July. Equipped with only two months of preparation, he has to face the PSLE Oral exam in August. Personally i find him a child who is obedient and studious but with low confidence and thus he has problems even speaking fluently. Furthermore, he does not come from a mandarin speaking background and has problem speaking out simple sentences.I know i had to drill him real hard to enable him to take the oral in august with optimum confidence.
Ryan: Mr Kok uses voice recording which other tutors never use before. This method helps me to recognise my weakness. For example, some chinese words or phrases i might pronounce them wrongly but when i listen to them through recording, I will know where have i read wrongly. Through teachers' help and many more practices, I can slowly correct my mistakes and speak better.
14.11.12
Is P6 Easy?
This year i am faced with a daunting task of teaching a bunch of "challenging" kids. First of all they were scoring 35-55 marks for their normal examinations. However, they made a tremendous improvement in their SA1 and prelim Chinese exam with them scoring 50-74 marks. They are very weak in their mother tongue, proficient in English but almost illiterate in Chinese. They do not know how to speak and write simple words often needing to check on the e-dicitonary for every two to three words when writing compos. On top of that, their attitude will make you think teaching them is impossible. Unless the tutor is their family member or relative, nobody will have the patience to teach them. All the bad habits you name it-Not doing any homework, not paying attention to you, distracting other students, playing computer games during lessons. To sum it up they are hyperactive, unable to keep still and listen. They will move about to distract other students making learning inconducive. It came to a point that even the last lesson before their PSLE exam, they still bother if they are able to play computer games if they do their work.
Originally, i do not have much confidence in teaching them well. But being in a desperate situation, i accepted their behaviour and approached teaching with a different set of methods. Firstly i take an effort to talk to them and build relationships with each student. Through rewarding them snacks and adequate breaks i try to win their favour in order for them to listen to what i say.
1)Knowing that their concentration span is relatively shorter than the average student, i emphasise the usage of laptops during class as a means to capture their attention.
2)When teaching a new chapter of the "ke ben", i will maximise the use of iflashbook (MOE recommended software) to teach them the new words or chi yu and how to read the text. When preparing for oral exams, i will use webcam and voice-recording softwares to effectively correct their mistakes in pronunciation and articulation in a yet interesting way. This will aid in their reading-the-passage, picture description and conversation components. Conventionally, teachers uses newspapers to teach students of news events.
3)But i rely on omy.com.sg news portal to allow them to learn the phrases commonly used in news events so as to expose them to the news report-style of cloze passages. Omy is a mandarin new portal where it has unique functions such as voice reading of the news article and with interactive videos and picture montouchs, the interest is kept alive. Composition wise, using news articles to impart vocabulary will give them confidence to write 150-280 word essays in the long-run, not forgetting comprehending skills when doing comprehension.
4) Allowing students to type out their essays rather than writing it out will reduce their difficulty in writing essays.
Normally during holidays, only with 12 to 20 lessons in total can the student fully grasp the basic skills required to undertake a national examination. Upon 3 weeks of returning to school, this can change the attitude of the students and speed up the progress of your child's Chinese language if they were to apply my techniques. With improvement shown in the school examinations such as SA1 and Prelims, your child will then have greater confidence to take the PSLE. This is similar to what happened to the four boys i taught this year. They made a tremendous improvement in their SA1 and prelim Chinese exam with them scoring 50- 74 marks. Hopefully they had brought this confidence to the examination hall to earn the A or A* they were aiming for.
Sec 1/ Chinese preparation course start next week, (19 Nov)
Sec 2-3/
Sec 4 O lvl preparation is already underway
29.10.12
Q: Which schools do the majority of your students come ?
A: Schools offering International Baccalaureate (IB) programme like ACS (I), SOTA, SST, SJI.
Schools offering Integrated Programme (IP) like Raffles Inst., SCGS, RGS, MGS, Victoria School, Hwa Chong Inst., Nat. JC and other schools: Cedar Girls Sec, Cresent Girls Sec, TKGS, St. Patrick Sec, Fairfield Methodist Sec.
Q: What is the main challenge that Secondary school students face in doing well for Chinese?
A: The two main papers 1 and 2 form the bulk of obstacles separating students from their desired A1, A2 grades.
Paper 2: Time management is also an issue for weak students under paper 2. They often spend too much time on the front sections such as cloze passages and Comprehension (MCQs), leaving insufficient time for comprehension open-ended which holds the bulk of marks. Weak students also tend to have problem constructing sentences to highlight the points to answer the questions. They could only rely on copying huge chunks of text from the passage which wastes time.
Paper 1: Students tend to spend too much time in Situational writing and are left with too little time to complete the composition component. One important point to note is that Situational Writing component forms 20 marks while composition forms 40 marks out of the total 60marks. Thus students should be aware that the time spent on the components must correspond to the mark weightage.
Another problem is the failure to highlight the main points in the newspaper article review. Students often side track and talk about reasons that are not relevant to the issue. It is hence inevitable that students get penalized for this error.
Students lack critical thinking skills to manage questions that involve free response. Comprehension texts from day one have been about the topics of moral values and even philosophical thoughts. For example, the value of giving and receiving, paternal and maternal love, optimism and pessimism. Students are required to mention their life examples when answering the free-response questions. Thus in my classes i would find passages belonging to this category for students to practice speaking it out and writing it out.
Q: Since PSLE is over for current P6 students, what is there to learn if they enrol in tuition?
A: They can sign up for headstart bridging lessons to give themselves an edge when they go on to secondary 1 next year. Secondary education is definitely different from primary school and Chinese is no exception. I see many Sec 1 students often struggle to maintain their previous results after being too used to primary school elementary Chinese.This is especially so for students planning to take Higher chinese.
In secondary school, composition is being tested at a higher level. No longer are the days where your child can look at the pictures and derive a story with the aid of helping words. They will now write more expository and even informative texts . Because to write a narrative in secondary school, you got to have a vivid vocabulary in order to pass. Local students often lack the ability to do so when being compared to their China counterparts The essay word length have to be increased also to 500 to 800 words for higher Chinese and a minimum word count of 300 words for Chinese. Such an increase in word length, gives rise to the challenge of lengthening their essays.
Next, for the main paper there are a total of 5 comprehension passages. No longer there is any graphic stimulus,replace-the-correct word and complete-the-sentence MCQs. Students have to possess good comprehending skills. The oral component is also no exception with conversation section that requires students to think on their feet to discuss issues of current affairs relevance. The shift to newspaper article reviews will need students to grasp general knowledge of current affairs in Chinese. Thus through newspapers and multimedia platforms such as omy.com, i will aim to nurture an interest in your child for current affairs. During this long break, allow your child to spend his time fruitfully to prepare early for his next stage of education. With lessons aimed to bring fun in learning Chinese thru video games and multimedia, it is definitely the best of both worlds!
A: Schools offering International Baccalaureate (IB) programme like ACS (I), SOTA, SST, SJI.
Schools offering Integrated Programme (IP) like Raffles Inst., SCGS, RGS, MGS, Victoria School, Hwa Chong Inst., Nat. JC and other schools: Cedar Girls Sec, Cresent Girls Sec, TKGS, St. Patrick Sec, Fairfield Methodist Sec.
Q: What is the main challenge that Secondary school students face in doing well for Chinese?
A: The two main papers 1 and 2 form the bulk of obstacles separating students from their desired A1, A2 grades.
Paper 2: Time management is also an issue for weak students under paper 2. They often spend too much time on the front sections such as cloze passages and Comprehension (MCQs), leaving insufficient time for comprehension open-ended which holds the bulk of marks. Weak students also tend to have problem constructing sentences to highlight the points to answer the questions. They could only rely on copying huge chunks of text from the passage which wastes time.
Paper 1: Students tend to spend too much time in Situational writing and are left with too little time to complete the composition component. One important point to note is that Situational Writing component forms 20 marks while composition forms 40 marks out of the total 60marks. Thus students should be aware that the time spent on the components must correspond to the mark weightage.
Another problem is the failure to highlight the main points in the newspaper article review. Students often side track and talk about reasons that are not relevant to the issue. It is hence inevitable that students get penalized for this error.
Students lack critical thinking skills to manage questions that involve free response. Comprehension texts from day one have been about the topics of moral values and even philosophical thoughts. For example, the value of giving and receiving, paternal and maternal love, optimism and pessimism. Students are required to mention their life examples when answering the free-response questions. Thus in my classes i would find passages belonging to this category for students to practice speaking it out and writing it out.
Q: Since PSLE is over for current P6 students, what is there to learn if they enrol in tuition?
A: They can sign up for headstart bridging lessons to give themselves an edge when they go on to secondary 1 next year. Secondary education is definitely different from primary school and Chinese is no exception. I see many Sec 1 students often struggle to maintain their previous results after being too used to primary school elementary Chinese.This is especially so for students planning to take Higher chinese.
In secondary school, composition is being tested at a higher level. No longer are the days where your child can look at the pictures and derive a story with the aid of helping words. They will now write more expository and even informative texts . Because to write a narrative in secondary school, you got to have a vivid vocabulary in order to pass. Local students often lack the ability to do so when being compared to their China counterparts The essay word length have to be increased also to 500 to 800 words for higher Chinese and a minimum word count of 300 words for Chinese. Such an increase in word length, gives rise to the challenge of lengthening their essays.
Next, for the main paper there are a total of 5 comprehension passages. No longer there is any graphic stimulus,replace-the-correct word and complete-the-sentence MCQs. Students have to possess good comprehending skills. The oral component is also no exception with conversation section that requires students to think on their feet to discuss issues of current affairs relevance. The shift to newspaper article reviews will need students to grasp general knowledge of current affairs in Chinese. Thus through newspapers and multimedia platforms such as omy.com, i will aim to nurture an interest in your child for current affairs. During this long break, allow your child to spend his time fruitfully to prepare early for his next stage of education. With lessons aimed to bring fun in learning Chinese thru video games and multimedia, it is definitely the best of both worlds!
27.5.12
2012 O level Hot Topics for composition/email-from Top Schools
2012年‘O’level 热门作文/私人/公务电邮
- 新移民令国人不满
- 越来越多学生参加海外CIP
- 地铁屡次发生故障，使搭客极度愤满
- 全国状元榜都是外国优秀生
- 街头党砍人
- 青少年当大耳窿跑腿
- 青少年太依赖女佣
- 精英犯罪
- 政府展开全民运动
- 地铁让位
- 地铁车厢里饮食
- 使用平板电脑(Ipad)/电子书的利弊
- 咖啡店肮脏到恶心的地步
- 抛弃，虐待宠物
- 学生讲脏话
- 家人在赌场沉迷于赌博，该怎么办？
- 青少年缺少睡眠
- 学生在假期打工引起争议
- 青少年在面对挫折时，不知如何应付。
- 未成年吸烟者不断增加
15.11.11
2011 PSLE Picture Discussion
Done by: Fairfield Methodist P6 top student
2011:Video of Gifted P6 girl from Nanyang,Cheryl
My Students' O level/PSLE 2010 results
Shi EnMethodist Girls' School
B4 for "O" lvl Chinese
JeannesOrchid Park Sec Sch
B4 for O lvl Chinese
Alicia Chong Li YanMethodist Girls School(Pri)
Aggregate:239
Chinese Grade:A
Tan Yong EnKong Hwa Sch
Aggregate: 232
Chinese Grade: A
Vanessa Tan Wen JingTao Nan Sch
Agg:231
Chinese:A
TrishaNorthland Pri Sch
Aggregate:218
Chinese Grade: A
Tan Yi Cheng
Raffles Girls School(Pri)
Chinese Grade: A
Testimonial from P6 RGS Yi Chen
RGS Yi Chen came to my tuition when she was still P5 and has improve greatly over the few months with me. She lives in Yio Chu Kang and has great difficulty coming over my house in the east for 1-to-1 tuition.Nevertheless she still managed to come at 8am in the morning consecutively for 5 days during the holidays.This intensive program was to make up for not being able to attend my lessons during school term as she's busy with her supplementary classes and other tuition. She is very intelligent and could pick up the main points and techniques of my teaching very well. This is partly due to her basic foundation in Chinese. When she entered, little push and she was able to improved greatly.Her prelim Oral scored a shocking 46/50 marks, pulling her overall marks up to a high A.
Here are the videos one in English and next one in Mandarin:
14.11.11
Is PSLE Chinese difficult?
The Primary School Leaving Examination is one that every student must take to move on to Secondary school. How well one does in this examination will determine which school he/she will enter. Is PSLE Chinese difficult? It depends on your child's foundation, and his/her exposure to the language. They will be tested on areas like writing, listening, and comprehending. Steps have been taken by MOE to adjust the marks allocated for each segment to decrease difficulty and increase relevance.
Some would question the importance of the subject in the overall aggregate score. A question frequently heard from parents is,"Why don't I allow my child to concentrate on English, Mathematics and Science first rather than Chinese?" The answer is the weightage of all the subjects are equal, and therefore a drop in Chinese will bring down the total aggregate score. I have students who missed out by one or two points to enter their desired schools of choice like ACS, Victoria they end up regretting not putting enough effort into Chinese.
Getting a huge improvement in grades is something that cannot be done overnight. To achieve the desired result, one must prepare for at least a year. Students should have a sturdy foundation and familiarise themselves with most of the common words by Primary Five. This is because during Primary Six the teachers will be too busy doing intense revision of the past two years to go through the basics. A deadly and unfortunately common mistake are students who prepare for the Chinese Examination at the very last minute. Students will not be able to study properly under the pressure and will likely panic on the day of the examination, which is not recommended. I strongly urge parents who have Primary Five children to send them for tuition classes during the upcoming November to December holidays if they are weak in the subject. Prepare early and you will have no regrets.
Some would question the importance of the subject in the overall aggregate score. A question frequently heard from parents is,"Why don't I allow my child to concentrate on English, Mathematics and Science first rather than Chinese?" The answer is the weightage of all the subjects are equal, and therefore a drop in Chinese will bring down the total aggregate score. I have students who missed out by one or two points to enter their desired schools of choice like ACS, Victoria they end up regretting not putting enough effort into Chinese.
Getting a huge improvement in grades is something that cannot be done overnight. To achieve the desired result, one must prepare for at least a year. Students should have a sturdy foundation and familiarise themselves with most of the common words by Primary Five. This is because during Primary Six the teachers will be too busy doing intense revision of the past two years to go through the basics. A deadly and unfortunately common mistake are students who prepare for the Chinese Examination at the very last minute. Students will not be able to study properly under the pressure and will likely panic on the day of the examination, which is not recommended. I strongly urge parents who have Primary Five children to send them for tuition classes during the upcoming November to December holidays if they are weak in the subject. Prepare early and you will have no regrets.
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