2012 PSLE Discussions and Strategy

[coast]

janet_lee88:

fightingmom:

[quote=\"janet_lee88\"]
This SA1 was a real nightmare. I had a hard time accepting his results compared to CA1. I literally went off track :stompfeet: :mad: :frustrated:

:hugs: Janet... Don't lose heart.

Thanks for your consolation...appreciate.
Fortunately it's not PMS which caused the gun powder to explode in me.
While trying to find out cause of his poor results, hubby is on my nerves telling him crap, and also telling me to accept Cs for psle. Cannot believe him saying that :slapshead: how could he be so negative ? As a parent, we should have absolute faith and if time management is the cause, we should work on that. I am ok if he can come back with 4 As.[/quote]Hi Janet,

Yes, you are right. What your DS need is encouragement.

Many schools set VERY difficult P6 CA1/ SA1 so that their students (after getting dismayed results) get worried and worked doubly hard for PSLE preparation.

http://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=35434

But it will backfire if the students lose their confidence and give up instead.

PSLE standard should be reasonable. It should be helpful for your DS to practise on these papers to gain his confidence and work on his weaker areas.

[coast]

Peony:

fifiyeo:

DS came home and reported his results for Math, Sci and Eng. Aiyoyo, so bad!


Although much better than CA1 (which he nearly failed), it is no where near good. (My good is not even band 1 in case some of you think I have very high expectations). :spank:

So today, DS took out his school books and started studying. He even started doing his school Math activity book and plans to finish everything before the end of the school hols so that he will have less homework and more time to revise in term 3.

So should forgive him or what??? :scratchhead:

YES!!!
Especially since he improved from CA1.

To me, effort & attitude matters more than results at this stage.

His PSLE results only decides which secondary school he goes to. BUT consistent effort and positive attitude can ensure continued progress that is lifelong.

How many times have we heard stories of kids who do very well for PSLE but slide in secondary school? And how many times have we heard of kids who were \"nowhere\" at primary school and go on to do awesome at secondary school onwards? I've heard plenty.

So if i were you, I'd be very happy with him.

My take is that most kids who have been studying consistently have actually done much better but the results do not reflect this as KILLER PAPERS were set to almost guarantee the school hauls in mostly As and A*s in the actual PSLE exams.

The students (and their parents) get stressed after these killer papers. Is it healthy? If the actual PSLE exams contain a small % of “higher ability” questions, would we still want our kids to go through such stress? Will schools still continue to set KILLER papers knowing that it differs much from actual PSLE standard?

But we do not really know if it is indeed a small % of “higher ability” questions in actual PSLE

Please read and vote whether you think the suggestion below helps (especially if you have younger kids since it's probably too late for any changes to affect the current P6s) :-

http://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=35434

[fifiyeo]

Peony:

fifiyeo:

DS came home and reported his results for Math, Sci and Eng. Aiyoyo, so bad!


Although much better than CA1 (which he nearly failed), it is no where near good. (My good is not even band 1 in case some of you think I have very high expectations). :spank:

So today, DS took out his school books and started studying. He even started doing his school Math activity book and plans to finish everything before the end of the school hols so that he will have less homework and more time to revise in term 3.

So should forgive him or what??? :scratchhead:

YES!!!
Especially since he improved from CA1.

To me, effort & attitude matters more than results at this stage.

His PSLE results only decides which secondary school he goes to. BUT consistent effort and positive attitude can ensure continued progress that is lifelong.

How many times have we heard stories of kids who do very well for PSLE but slide in secondary school? And how many times have we heard of kids who were \"nowhere\" at primary school and go on to do awesome at secondary school onwards? I've heard plenty.

So if i were you, I'd be very happy with him.

My take is that most kids who have been studying consistently have actually done much better but the results do not reflect this as KILLER PAPERS were set to almost guarantee the school hauls in mostly As and A*s in the actual PSLE exams.

DS told me that the papers were harder. I wonder. Will find out from teachers during the upcoming meeting.

All these KILLER PAPERS make our lives so miserable. We don't even know if DS is going to do ok or not.

Yes, I think he deserve some credit. But scary thought still since grades are still a distance away from P5 SA2!

[fifiyeo]

DS has not done well this year. Yet he wants to go for DSA for his particular dream school. I wonder if I should let him go and try. Might be wasting time. Sigh...


I think he is going to seek out his teacher today to have a talk with her about his chances. I don't think he wants to give up hope. Rather he is still very hopeful.

[coast]

Chenonceau:

I have a somewhat different problem now. DS has planned his own revision schedule from now until end-June. After school today, he targetted...

(1) 1 Math Paper 2
(2) 1 Science Paper
(3) Read 1 PRC Model Compo and copy out yummy words (requires 30 minutes)
(4) Self ting xie of the yummy compo words from the previous day.

I tried to tell him that he would not be able to manage the Science Paper on top of everything else. I'm out this evening and when I called home to DS... sure enough... he had not completed the Science Paper. He insisted that by the end of the week, he was confident he could complete everything he planned.

I am not so sure because he seems to have overplanned for every day of the week. I'm thinking that by the end of the week, I'll have a crying 11 year old on my hands because he will be looking at a whole mound of work that he had wanted to do and couldn't finish.

He got angry with me when I tried to take out some items from his plan. He said, \"Do you think I'll have time to get in enough practice Mom?\" He's so anxious that he is OVER working. And I can't buffer him from stress if he won't let me. Hmmmmm... I didn't foresee this problem this year.

DD only demonstrated this OVERwork trait in Sec 3. DS is 3 years too early. It just goes to show how stressful the system is.

Maybe you can ask him to switch to weekly goals instead? It might be more obvious to him whether he has overplanned if he put what he wants to achieve in a week. At the mean time, he can work towards those goals without feeling too anxious about \"these are the things I NEED to complete today\".

Then record the goals completed (and the actual duration) daily (record % if partially completed) and check the progress against the weekly goals at the end of each day.

Hope it helps.

[psle2011mum]

fifiyeo:

DS came home and reported his results for Math, Sci and Eng. Aiyoyo, so bad!


Although much better than CA1 (which he nearly failed), it is no where near good. (My good is not even band 1 in case some of you think I have very high expectations). :spank:

So today, DS took out his school books and started studying. He even started doing his school Math activity book and plans to finish everything before the end of the school hols so that he will have less homework and more time to revise in term 3.

So should forgive him or what??? :scratchhead:

Love is not blind - it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.
Rabbi Julius Gordon

You know your DS best and you are in a unique position to support him. Don't give up his dreams or yours now -- the kiddos really do mature alot through this experience. Take care!

[psle2011mum]

Chenonceau:

(4) Self ting xie of the yummy compo words from the previous day.

Chenonceau

Just to share about the above.

We kind of abandoned \"ting xie\" in P6 because we found that the structure of the paper was that the kids don't really need to write the words from the textbook in the MT written paper. So DD stopped writing all the ting xie words 10 times each as practice.

For MT compo, they are allowed an e-dictionary. So DD would memorise phrases, passages, sentences and we made sure she got them phonetically correct so that she could check these out on the e-dict during the exams using han yu pin yin. With the words staring at her from the e-dict, there was no excuse to write the word wrongly (something she sometimes did on the more common words she thought she didn't need to check eg missing a stroke or a \"dian').

Of course if the kids know how to write the word, that's wonderful. But we were trying to save every little bit of time we could so that DD had more time to rest/play as well, so we let the ting xie slide [school still tested but DD mainly just eye-balled the words and then scored something like 70-80 on her ting xie when prior to P6, it was mostly full mark scores because she had written them out for practice].

I can't say that this is a good method to advocate [ DD and I were only aiming for a high enough A for MT so that it wouldn't drag her other grades down and having only aimed this high, I guess that was where we ended up] but I raise this just an alternate view for consideration.

BTW, one of the questions I asked the teachers first for each paper in P6 was :
\" Did you set this paper below, above or about PSLE standard?\".

I did get honest answers I believe because the MT teacher actually said, \" A little lower than PSLE since we need to motivate the students\". Even then, DD barely scraped through an A and that was the highest score in her HA class. The good news is that while the cohort didn't do so well in all the exams including the Prelims, the same cohort turned in a stellar record of quality passes last year (surpassing English marginally). I've shared that we had a very conscientious and caring Chinese teacher and the HOD, MT was also very approachable and freely shared her views as to whether what I was trying to do helped or should be modified. So don't write off MT just based on the results for this SA1 - there is much hope yet.

[peterch]

fifiyeo:

DS came home and reported his results for Math, Sci and Eng. Aiyoyo, so bad!


Although much better than CA1 (which he nearly failed), it is no where near good. (My good is not even band 1 in case some of you think I have very high expectations). :spank:

So today, DS took out his school books and started studying. He even started doing his school Math activity book and plans to finish everything before the end of the school hols so that he will have less homework and more time to revise in term 3.

So should forgive him or what??? :scratchhead:

May I prefer you to encourage him and ask him to put more effort in his study. I don't think being angry and scold him will do him any good. I did angry and scold my son before, but it didn't change him so tried another way to push him such as discussing his future and present condition, and try to show him the 'fierce' side of this world and let him think and guide him what he should do next. Cheers

[Nebbermind]

fifiyeo:

DS has not done well this year. Yet he wants to go for DSA for his particular dream school. I wonder if I should let him go and try. Might be wasting time. Sigh...


I think he is going to seek out his teacher today to have a talk with her about his chances. I don't think he wants to give up hope. Rather he is still very hopeful.

These days when alot of kids actually take things for granted, it's a good sign to see that they have their own dreams!!

You ought to be encouraging him. EVen if he does not make it, he knew that he had tried and have no regrets!!

Anyway, some schools are not so concerned abt past result. Just go for some paper tests and then they release the CO results.

MUST TRY!!

[Chenonceau]

psle2011mum:

Chenonceau:

(4) Self ting xie of the yummy compo words from the previous day.

Chenonceau

Just to share about the above.

We kind of abandoned \"ting xie\" in P6 because we found that the structure of the paper was that the kids don't really need to write the words from the textbook in the MT written paper. So DD stopped writing all the ting xie words 10 times each as practice.

....

So don't write off MT just based on the results for this SA1 - there is much hope yet.

Heyyyyy... thanks for weighing in. We're not doing school ting xie at all. He draws out phrases from the China compos he reads daily and puts them in his book. Since he has seen these phrases in context, he knows how they are used and he does ting xie in order to learn to write them for use in compos.

It's also good at keeping the brain synapses (specifically used for remembering how to write Chinese characters) firing. Keep those synapses well-toned so they don't get flabby. Even without the PSLE, I think this is worth doing. I do want him to achieve some degree of true competence in Chinese... and this is a nice stress-free way of doing it. It doesn't take much time. Only 15 minutes to ting xie his list and certainly no need to copy 10 times. Quick and daily.

I'm willing myself not to worry about his PSLE Chinese.

I know he has improved. In end P4, he needed 7 hours to memorize a model composition written by PRC 12 year olds well enough to READ it to me. Now, he doesn't need to memorize these compos anymore to read to me. He needs to only listen to the audio tape once and he can read the whole piece fluently to me (all done in 20 minutes instead of 7 hours). His marks in Chinese have definitely improved a great deal.

Hence, I am not in despair. I am actually quite hopeful. He has come a long way and I am proud of him even though he is still nowhere near the top of the class.