2012 PSLE Discussions and Strategy
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janet_lee88:
I hope you dun mind... I worry a little about your kids, you know...
Education today is not easy and nerve wrecking...I am stressed out with 2. Older one facing PSLE next year. My hubby is stressed finding time to coach younger one.
Since your eldest is just going to P1, don't think too far. Most schools allow en-bloc from P1-2. There are several tests throughout the year for some schools since there isn't any exams.
If parents are always stressed, it'll rub off on the children. When I work with my son, I am usually not stressed. The rare times when I was stressed, I could tell it was counter-productive. So, I had to take time off to pray and to regain my own emotional equilibrium.
With my son, I just focus on the small little goals (one at a time) that I know will lead to the big big one e.g., one Chinese compo a day. As long as we have done that, we are happy. On a daily basis, we don't think about exams. We think about the work we have to do, and when we do it, we are happy. Being happy is motivating. The small pleasures in life build motivation and give hope.
Our glass is half full because we see the part that is full. Those who see the glass half empty as you go through the PSLE journey will be very frustrated. There is a fair bit of good quality research on the benefits of optimism. A bit of this research is reported in a book edited by Alice Isen, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. It demonstrates that optimism contributes to academic success. See reference here... http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=H8iyRo7raTgC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51&dq=optimism+isen&source=bl&ots=oMr-Na0_C8&sig=OmbNoSt6CxF4Ir51xIvMF-SmVjQ&hl=en&ei=juTnTpb7I4K4rAfTvsWPBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=optimism%20isen&f=false
You write well. You have great planning and organization skills. You are deeply involved with your kids. These are all wonderful things that in themselves predispose your kids to some success. You're a great, wonderful and dedicated Mommy. Don't be so hard on yourself because if you are, it will translate to 10 times more pressure on your kiddies.
Of course, the same research that I linked you above also discussed the benefits of defensive pessimism. Maybe that is what works for you. In which case, being stressed may be good for you after all!! In any case, do consider the possibility that your stress may not be good for your kiddos and then make up your own mind about the whole issue eh? -
Hi Everyone
This post is about Compre in the Main English Paper.
We speak English at home so DD should have been having a breeze with this subject but she still lost marks all over her main paper if left to her own devices.
I’ll share what worked for us for the various parts of the paper over a few posts but will start with our biggest bugbear – the Open Ended Comprehension ( OEC).
This is what worked for us for the OEC in the English Main Paper:
On analysis, I discovered that DD was actually quite mentally tired out by the time she reached the OEC and she was only skimming the given Compre passage.
All Tired Out
In spite of how school had been arranging the testing of the compo and the main paper, the English (and Chinese) PSLE papers are actually taken one following the other with something like an hour’s “break” in between. This ‘follow on” style is quite strenuous for most children and all the more, if they haven’t “practiced” in this fashion. The break of about an hour is not a real “break” either. You take off about 10 to 15 minutes from the end of the compo paper because this is “collection of paper” time and then you take off another 30 minutes from the period before the start of the main paper as the children need to line up outside the exam hall and then get into the exam hall 15 minutes before the actual start of the main paper. That leaves about 20+ minutes to eat, go to the loo and do whatever else the kids need to ie there is no time to “rest”. With these in mind, I directed DD to start the main paper by doing the OEC.
A word of caution here; DD never had any issues with checking that she had fully completed the paper, so I did not expect her starting at the back of the paper to be a problem. This may not apply to some children, so again, this strategy may not be for everyone.
Skimming when she should have ‘ Mined for Meaning”
Starting at the back of the paper helped, but it was not the magic panacea. The “magic” – “Annotations”.
Like I shared before, DD is a reader but one who reads for entertainment. She was just interested in finding out what happened in the end. She was not “mining for meaning”. I didn’t coin this phrase – this is the title of a Secondary 1 textbook used for Lit. So I taught DD to annotate. Again, this wasn’t a strategy I devised – this was what the English trainer I learnt from, also taught. As adults, we probably do this process mentally and unconsciously, but for kids, most bypass this process altogether because kids are so much more in the “here and now” to care about what happened along the way.
What are annotations? Simply, notes -- notes about what you read. It can take many forms eg in the form of questions, drawings, character listings, even answers to some of the questions you raised earlier as you read. You are not limited as to the form but you can’t make annotations if you skim the passage.
Teachers sometimes teach this in class and encourage the kids to ‘highlight the important parts of the passage”. We went through this phase too -- until I saw that DD was becoming an expert in colouring but not any better in getting the marks for the OEC. I banned the highlighter after that. DD worked with a pencil and a thick ruler-like piece of opaque cardboard about 2.5 inches in breadth [came from some packaging material leftover in the office]. The cardboard piece was used so that she could not see the rest of the passage and had to concentrate on the sentence before her and mine it for meaning before she could move on. She did not bring this cardboard piece to the PSLE exam [exam rules against bringing in paper] but used a thick semi-opaque ruler instead, but by this time, she had already cultivated the habit of annotating.
Annotating takes time – DD typically spent one hour on the OEC section of the paper and finished the rest of the paper including checking of the rest of the paper in 50minutes. At the end of her annotations – usually a process that took about 40 minutes, her passage text would be scrawled with words in the margins, sometimes drawings of stick people in a setting at the side [ for example when there was a scene where the characters were described in locations relative to each other], listings for characters [ her impressions of the main characters in the passage including details of these characters as provided in the passage eg Andy was the younger brother in the family; he liked to swim; he was mischievous – always up to tricks], “linking” arrows for pronouns/possessives to relate back to who/whom that pronoun/possessive referred to, questions that popped into her head as she read [ eg Sentence in the passage is “Andy’s family was in low-spirits” – “ she would probably write something like “what caused them to be so unhappy?”], “linking” arrows to parts of the passage which provided answers to the questions she raised as she read [ from my last immediate example, she may have found something later in the passage that explained it and thus would draw an arrow between this part she found and the original question she asked herself]. The purpose of the annotations was to slow her down, add depth to her comprehension and “turn on the TV in her head” to “see” what the passage described. This skill took time to develop and for quite a while, I marked DD’s annotations first and did “corrections” for her annotations before she even attempted the questions ie if the annotations were poorly done, we went back to take her through the exercise of annotating line by line [again with me asking leading questions to “scaffold”]. I also “modeled” annotations for her so she could see how much meaning could be mined from a single sentence [ “ show” don’t “tell”]. DD never reached my level of annotating nor did she need to. I’ve gotten in 30 years more of reading than her, so my mining was always more fruitful. But I am a believer in a regime of “ high-averages” [ if you are interested in this, google the Finnish Education System and see how the Finns did well in the PISA tests], so while there was no need to reach my standard, I practiced with DD at that higher-than-she-could-achieve standard and let her reach for that. Even if she did not “make it”, she was hitting well above her peers and that was fine with me.
Question the Question – similar to what we did for the other subjects, we spent time asking questions about the question, chief of which was – what does the tester want to achieve/to test by asking this question. DD understood this when I phrased it as “what does the tester wish you to show/demonstrate your understanding of’. So if the question was “Why did Andy cry?”, DD learnt not just to answer “Andy cried because he was sad.” but to go on and demonstrate her understanding from the passage -- perhaps something like this “Andy cried because he was sad.His grandmother, whom he had been very close to, had just passed away.” Some teachers use the phrase “add the details” but when I tried this with DD, she was just intent on copying out “wholesale” all the details she could find in the sentences where she thought the answer would be, regardless of whether it answered the question or was relevant; so I found this direction of ‘add the details” unhelpful for DD.
With DD’s slower reading of the passage [because of the need to do annotations] and increased comprehension of the passage [also because of the annotations] and her increased understanding of the requirements of the question [by questioning the question] , the questions themselves became a lot more manageable and she really did not have to spend that much time on them. Slowly but surely, she was hitting at least 16 to 19 out of 20 for the OEC.
Marking against the Answer Key -There was a tendency for teachers to mark against an Answer Key so when DD's answers were marked 'wrong\", I tried to apply a common sense approach and distinguished between where DD’s answers were outright and in fact, wrong and where the teacher was just parroting the Answer Key. I don’t think I went that far wrong overall because in the exam scripts [where I believe there is a more consultative process between perhaps more than one marker], DD was bringing in the marks.
Checking her Answers – DD devised a full system of checks where she would check in a systematic fashion her OEC answers. She did this by writing down a series of alphabets beside her answers; something like T,S,CS and some other alphabets. These stood for things like “Tense”,” Spelling”, “Complete Sentence” [ this last one came about because initially when DD did the main paper in the sequence it was set, she was so tired out by the time she reached the OEC section that she could leave an answer sentence uncompleted and not realise it] . As DD completed her check for that particular item eg she had checked that she had answered the question in the correct tense, she ticked through the ‘T” she had marked at the side of the paper. I can’t remember all the alphabets DD used in her checking list because she devised a few more after I started her on the first 3 above.
Side Notes
Some of you have asked me about this English trainer I worked with; she is not a tutor but is still actively involved in the teaching of English in our schools. She has a blog and if you are interested, just send me a private message for the link. I have chosen not to publish her details here because she is semi-retired (and enjoying it) and I’m not sure what the response would be from the community if I just published her name/contact; so I am providing this information in a more controlled fashion – I seek your kind understanding on this.
My experience with DD and with some other kids I’ve spoken to is that THEY want to do well. They live in a very competitive environment where failure is not well received/looked down upon so often, when they look like they aren’t interested in putting the effort, it’s not that at all. A lot of them would rather be labeled ‘rebellious’, ‘stubborn”, “disinterested” even “lazy”, as long as it’s not “stupid”. I knew my DDs were not “stupid” but I also knew that if I left them to their own devices, they would be pulling in comfortable ‘Bs” and borderline “As” and would probably think themselves as “stupid’. However, if I could lead, scaffold and support them to achieve and taste small successes, I knew they would gain enough motivation and self-confidence to eventually replicate this success for themselves. The system expects a lot out of our kids these days and there is a GAP in the system [ between what is taught and what is tested] which I feel not many kids can bridge by themselves. So will YOU stand in the gap for your children? I assure you, you won’t regret it.
\"Ideal teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross, then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.\" -- Nikos Kazantzakis -1883 -1957 Greek writer and philosopher.
I’ll stop here for now and come back at some later time with more to share. -
jtoh:
DSA is for those who have exhibited exceptional ability in a particular academic domain, sport or aesthetic field over and beyond that of their peers. So if your child is planning to apply for DSA under Math domain, then of course Math Olympiad results are very important. If not, then it's not important. It's nice to have and may add on to the portfolio but not that important. What's important is to excel in the domain you have applied under, be it English, HCL, etc.
market recognize platinum winner for MO demonstrate exceptional abiltiy for the math domain. how about HCL? need to show something in the 写作比赛 or 演讲比赛? can any parents share successful case of HCL DSA ?
TIA -
HyperKiasu:
i found the above query more relevant under DSA thread, will repost it there.jtoh:
DSA is for those who have exhibited exceptional ability in a particular academic domain, sport or aesthetic field over and beyond that of their peers. So if your child is planning to apply for DSA under Math domain, then of course Math Olympiad results are very important. If not, then it's not important. It's nice to have and may add on to the portfolio but not that important. What's important is to excel in the domain you have applied under, be it English, HCL, etc.
market recognize platinum winner for MO demonstrate exceptional abiltiy for the math domain. how about HCL? need to show something in the 写作比赛 or 演讲比赛? can any parents share successful case of HCL DSA ?
TIA -
Dear psle2011mum,
I want to say a big BIG BIG \"THANK YOU\" to you for your generous sharing!!! :thankyou: (my dd is also P6 next yr, your post means a lot!!)
Really appreciate all the forumers for the help, advices, sharing, etc etc!!
:lovesite: -
Hi psle2011mum,
This is deep from my heart. Thank you so much for sharing generously. -
mn:
As a parent of a child facing PSLE next year, I appreciate what you posted...truly first hand experience.Hi psle2011mum,
This is deep from my heart. Thank you so much for sharing generously. -
Hi kaka, elkniwt, mn and janet_lee88
Happy to share and glad if it helped you and your DC.
I just wanted to add that some of the things I learnt, I did only because many other generous Mummies freely shared with me what worked for their kids too. We were greatly blessed and now just trying to do a little to pass what we learnt on.
All the best everyone! -
psle2011mum:
Hi kaka, elkniwt, mn and janet_lee88
Happy to share and glad if it helped you and your DC.
I just wanted to add that some of the things I learnt, I did only because many other generous Mummies freely shared with me what worked for their kids too. We were greatly blessed and now just trying to do a little to pass what we learnt on.
All the best everyone!
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psle2011mum:
Thank you for taking the time to share with us. Really appreciate it!Hi kaka, elkniwt, mn and janet_lee88
Happy to share and glad if it helped you and your DC.
I just wanted to add that some of the things I learnt, I did only because many other generous Mummies freely shared with me what worked for their kids too. We were greatly blessed and now just trying to do a little to pass what we learnt on.
All the best everyone!
:thankyou:
Think you are really amazing doing so much for your kiddo even though you're working full time! :salute:
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