2012 PSLE Discussions and Strategy

[namehere]

Hello all, I have been a silent reader to this topic. My ds will be taking her PSLE next year. Thank you very much for all the inputs everyone have given. I must say that it has been a great help


Please pardon my question below and if it falls under the wrong subject, please help redirect me to the correct forum link as I am new to this.

Being a potato parent, the CL marks has been dragging the rest of her other marks down. Fortunately she is doing well in the 3 other subjects. The only tuition she has is for CL. My current concern that I have is for Science and I believe all of us are aware of the key words and correct concept being given for the answers. As such, I have sent her somewhere which starts the lesson with Cycles- (plants now) nothing on P6 work done as of yet. We are currently aiming for DSA so each and every test marks will account for the total CA1 marks... so am getting worried.

As such, to catch up with the tuition centre, may I know if anyone knows what the topic the school will begin with for Science, in general what will the first topic be tested so on and so forth.

TIA for any input.

[psle2011mum]

Hi Everyone,


This was what helped us in some of the other parts of the English Main Paper and English Oral.

Synthesis and Transformation

This section is marked very strictly eg DD could lose the whole 2 marks for a grammar error and 1 mark just for a spelling error; so we had to train her to get each question in this section totally correct.

I started with analysing what this section was trying to test and concluded the following:
a.\tQuestions could be largely grouped into ‘connector’ questions and “reported speech” questions; after sorting the questions into these 2 groups, DD got less confused as to when she needed to change the tense eg necessary in reported speech and 2 past events, one more past than the other; but not necessary in most “connector” questions.

b.\tThis section is another test of language ability. I put it in terms that DD could understand and explained that the questions were to test whether she could say the same thing in another way without losing the meaning of the original sentence, thus demonstrating one’s language ability.

I illustrated (b) by pointing out the ‘basic” sentences which would form the questions in this section.
Eg : Sally drank her milk. After that, she headed off to school.

DD agreed that this level of writing was not exceptionally high – quite stilted and basic.

The transformed sentence, which merged the 2 sentences into one, required a higher level of linguistic ability.

Eg. After Sally had drunk her milk, she headed off to school.

After DD understood this, she no longer grumbled about the relevance of this section. On occasion, we found similar ‘stilted” sentences in her compos and used those as “questions” to transform her sentences into better ones.

We never used any assessment books for English from P4 but hit the past year papers from other schools from the out-set eg doing P6 English papers for practice starting in the P5 year-end holidays. After each paper had been gone through, we would tear out the page with the S& T questions and put them into a file. We started our collection in earnest mid-way of P5 and continued throughout P6. You guessed it – this then became our revision file in the run-up to the PSLE. On hindsight, we could have refined this by further sorting the completed questions into those DD had completed without errors and the questions she had errors in, so that the revision was more focused.

Spelling
I ‘reverse engineered” by taking the answer keys from the past year papers and put all the Spelling “answers” from the Spelling and Editing section into a list which became our Spelling List. School did issue Spelling Lists, but for some reason, always chose to give these out quite late in the day, even though the Lists from ’09 and the Lists from ’11 were by and large the same. MrsWongtuition, who has participated in this forum, also kindly published a list of words to help the children and DD and I benefitted from her generous sharing – thank you Mrs Wong!

Corrections for the “WHOLE” paper

For the other sections in the paper, DD was generally doing about 70% correctly on her own; but even when she got the question right, when we did the corrections, we went through all the choices and in this way, achieved a “multiplier” effect ie she knew one “answer’ but also learnt/reinforced her knowledge of all the other choices provided. I did have a slight advantage here because I work with words allowing me to give many illustrations of how the choices could be used in other scenarios, but it was still hard work and often the corrections took as long as the duration of the paper. On bad days, it took longer.

I don’t think you should just give up here even if you don’t think your English language skills are good enough-- there were often enough times when we had to look things up too and for that, DD would use her Besta 668 [we bought it for Chinese but it came loaded with the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary too].

Other References

These were books we used strictly for referencing as it was far too tedious to teach or even to learn from them.

For subject verb agreement, I bought a Learner’s Publishing book titled “English Wise Subject - Verb Agreement “ by Rosalind Fergusson (RF) [ISBN: 9789814192408] .I got it from Popular in 2008 and am not sure if you can still get this book today. I learnt of it from a Popular catalogue and I believe it was under the secondary school reference section when I located a copy at the bookshop. If you look into this book, you’ll understand why I made the first statement in this section. For every subject-verb agreement “rule” there were exceptions and for every exception, there were more exceptions. RF’s book however was a good reference point because she had provided explanations as to how to apply the rules and best of all, she acknowledged that some of the “rules” had probably evolved over time and become ‘acceptable” – hence they had gained the status of “exceptions”. Some were thus "conventionally" correct and thus acceptable. Her book helped to make more sense to a confusing jumble of rules.

Grammar books – I did buy the MPAH Grammar guides for P5/6 but again when there were rules upon rules and exceptions to the exceptions, I merely referred to it for specific questions and never taught from them.

Grammar Girl by Mignon Fogarty; for the technologically advanced amongst you, this comes in the form of a podcast and Ms Fogarty has an easy to read/listen style, lending an element of ‘fun” to the really very dry subject of English Grammar. I however preferred to access a hard copy and requested Kinokuniya to bring in the book for me. The staff at Kinokuniya gave me dubious looks at that time and asked me what kind of book it was, reminding me that the book had to clear our local censorship board. The reason, Mignon Fogarty’s grammar book is called “Quick and Dirty Tips to Better Writing”. I “braved” the censorship board but you can actually easily access online Ms Fogarty many posts about commonly made grammar mistakes and many brain mnemonics [aids/tips] to remember the grammar rules.

Reading

Even as DD prepared for the PSLE, she never stopped reading for pleasure. It was far less painful than any other method we employed to bring up her score.


Oral

For someone who came from a family of English speakers, you would have thought that this part of the exam would be a piece of cake for DD. Unfortunately, English Oral was still something DD had to work at because she is a quiet child by nature and preferred to keep any opinions she had to herself.

DD also had a habit of transferring some “strategies” from what she had learnt for Chinese Oral into her English Oral Conversations, leading her to sound quite unnatural and a lot less fluent in English, as she was doing a “direct” translation of the Chinese sentence into English.

The solution? Mummy wrote out for her Topic specific vocabulary eg “commuters on board the MRT” instead of “people sitting in the MRT train” and then “spotted” issues/scenarios and wrote out paragraphs describing views/opinions in relation to the scenario or issue. Eg. Commuters who pretend to sleep on the train so that they did not have to give up their seats to others. In writing out the paragraphs on the issues, Mummy wrote to cover both sides of the issue and also wrote to take took a view at the end, with reasons to substantiate the view. Eg.

Conversation Topic Question:
What do you think of the young man sleeping in the Reserved Seat while the elderly gentleman is standing?
I believe the young man may have taken the Reserved Seat when no one else needed it. However, even then, the young man must have known that he was occupying a Reserved Seat since it is clearly marked. If so, he should not be sleeping in it but instead, occupying it only temporarily and all the while watching out for anyone else who boarded later who might have needed it. But we also cannot discount the fact that the young man could be really tired and therefore could have inadvertently fallen asleep. If so, I do believe that if someone were to gently wake him up, he would be happy to give up his seat to the elderly gentlemen. I think incidents such as these are quite commonplace but we cannot assign blame clearly in every case. It would be much better for everyone if we do not take it that only the commuters occupying the Reserved Seat are tasked to give up their seats, since any one of the seated passengers can and should do it as the need arises.
Conversation Topic Follow on Question:
What would you do if you were standing next to the elderly gentleman and the sleeping young man?
I do not think I would have the courage to prod the young man awake as I am not confrontational by nature, but since there are other passengers with seats, I would approach one of the friendlier looking ones and ask politely for them to assist the elderly gentleman by giving up their seat for him. [Note: I encouraged DD to give “honest” answers instead of merely “pat”/”politically correct” ones so that they were more sincere to the examiners’ ears]
We spotted topics and I wrote out our own notes for each, training DD to take a view and learn to substantiate it simply with her reasons for that view. DD never did and never needed to reach Mummy’s standard of “Conversation” as such, but I do think all that practice helped her at the PSLE oral exams.
In the last week before the children sat for PSLE Oral, DD came back with homework where the teacher had written out potential conversation questions and asked the students to write out their “answers”; for the topics we had not “covered”, we similarly ran through the above exercise.

Side Notes
I have received such a warm reception to these sharings that I feel really embarrassed. You are all very welcome and I am just happy if some of these posts help other parents and their DC.
Have a great weekend everyone!

[Verysuperkiasu]

namehere:

As such, to catch up with the tuition centre, may I know if anyone knows what the topic the school will begin with for Science, in general what will the first topic be tested so on and so forth.

TIA for any input.

I suppose u r referring to P6 topics?

For my ds (P6 this year), his school started with topics like Forces, Environment, Adaptations, Man & environment, energy - different forms like electrical, heat, kinetic, potential,light and photosynthesis.

P6 will be a short year - teachers would normally finish teaching syllabus by mid year. For science, my ds teacher took a little longer - if I remember correctly, the finished by July this year. Then went into full swing revision.

Hope it helps.

[pixiedust]

Thank you psle2011mum ! :salute: how you did the filing for revision ! Your posts are definitely big help and inspiration to me and I am sure for many readers here. Hope to see you around often !


Re: Learner's Publishing book mentioned by psle2011mum, just want to update here that it is still available in Popular. I bought one 2 years ago and I still see it on Popular's shelves. Here is how the cover looks like :
http://www.paramountbooks.com.pk/images/books/9789814192408.jpg\">

[namehere]

Thank you very much verysuperkiasu. I will have to voice my concern with the centre as they should be starting on new P6 topics as mentioned.


@psle2011mum,thanks so much for your valuable advice n tips!

[PapaTan]

There is an article in today online. I think it is worth a read.

http://www.todayonline.com/Columns/ParenttoParent/EDC111127-0000004/Falling-victim-to-exam-fever

[peggy]

PapaTan:

There is an article in today online. I think it is worth a read.

http://www.todayonline.com/Columns/ParenttoParent/EDC111127-0000004/Falling-victim-to-exam-fever

Thanks PapaTan!

It's indeed a good one. Just realized that it's reflecting myself.

[pepper spice]

\"The most rewarding moment came when he told me one day that he loved me for being a mum who was willing to change when I realised that my approach was not working. This, to him, was what made me special as a mother.\"



So touching, I was tearing as I read this part.

[Mychildren]

Good article! Thanks PapaTan.

[janet88]

For science, it's better to use a later edition...not necessary latest. Happened to see an old edition on the shelf (2008), and didn't know that movement energy is now called kinetic...stored energy is potential energy.


Dare not imagine the speed teacher will take to finish the entire P6 syllabus when school reopens. Was told there might even be staying back 3-4 times a week. :yikes: very very scary. Hope it isn't compulsory bcos son has tuition after school. Sat is packed with CL and math tuition and planning to give him a half Sunday to distress from week activities. He cannot get burnt out.