English Assessment Books

[Miss Raja]

The grammar skills book by rosemary ellen is quite good. Make sure you teach the grammar rule for each exercise and ensure the kids understand how to apply it before giving the practice questions. Otherwise kids will do the exercise by ear; by which I mean they do it according to what they hear. The problem with that is that Singlish has a lot of grammar mistakes. So if you don’t explicitly tell the child what is correct, there will be no use doing grammar exercises again and again.


Also, I uploaded some materials onto my blog. There is a collocation skills based comprehension cloze, Vocabulary MCQ drills from this year’s prelim papers and a Vocabulary cloze reading for meaning exercise. These are a representation of the type of worksheets and skills I teach in class. Will upload more according to parents’ requests, so feel free to request. I have a lot of worksheets accumulated over the years just gathering dust, might as well donate to you pple hehe.

[janet88]

I find question tags hard to explain to my daughter.

As for grammar cloze, I noticed that it involves phrasal verbs.
Comprehension cloze involves skill to teach.

[Miss Raja]

That’s true. I think the best way to do this is to get a teacher who is able to teach according to the proper rules. I suppose the first thing to try and learn the rules yourself first before teaching. Just to understand, what kind of resources do you think you need when teaching the rules to your child?

[optimistforum]

Hi Miss Raja


I have scanned you Blog and I like it a lot.

Two questions, please:

1. I posted the following link on 4 October. It is a USA site with rich English exercises, including inference comprehension. I would recommend posting a link to that site from your site. http://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=20447&p=869074&hilit=optimistforum#p869074

2. My P4 son does MCQ Comprehension Quesrtions from a book called, Pick and Choose MCQ English Passages. Someone has publihsed the book on the web. DS1 did Ex 3 yesterday and got 13/15. My question to you, what level is the book pitched at: P3, P5, PSLE or above.
http://must-zone.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/3-on-buying-books.html

Thanks

[veraclari]

Hi Parents,


my kids hate to learn Vocab which is so important too! Just wondering if there are
Any good books u can recommend for that? Perhaps have meanings etc with practices so they don’t have to chk dictionary separately? TIA!!!

[juz_me]

Hi,


How to teach cloze passages especially those without helping words?

My son failed in this section.

Thanks!

[Miss Raja]

Cloze passages test a lot of collocation. This means it tests if you know that certain words always come together. They also test if the student knows the correct word to use in the context of the passage.


For my students, I use a unique way of developing cloze passage skills. You start off by giving them an article, asking them to speed read through it and indicate the difficulty on a scale of 1 to 5. After that, you get them to underline words and expressions they do not know and get them to use a dictionary to check and learn ( the use of dictionary is very important as it teaches the child to direct his/her own learning ). After that, get the child to read the passage again and explain it to you. You can correct any concepts and then get them to do a cloze passage based on the article.

Sometimes for weak students, I do as many as 15-20 short passages like this to drill the concepts in. If you do this, try and get passages on roughly the same topic so that you can help the child learn faster.



Cheers Miss Raja
[email protected]

[optimistforum]

Has anyone used Hadyn Richards vocab books, as I am used to using EPH Complete Practice or Challenging English Books, which unfortunately are MCQ. Has anyone used the books below and how to do they compare to SG P5/P6 vocab books:


1) One Thousand Vocabulary Exercises
2) One Thousand Harder Vocabulary Exercises

[janet88]

i bought cloze assessment books to prepare my daughter for p3.


Cloze Practice by Rosalind Lee (MC). The other one is Mastering Cloze Passage published by Just Education. I like the explanation and model practice before each exercise for Cloze Practice.

[Village Girl]

I have been buying close assessment book for my girls too. However, the elder still failed her compre close section. Scored badly for her English this year.