I’ve been wanting to write about this since week 1, but managed to procrastinate until now. Anyway, this will serve as a record of my experiences with my kid in P1, and hopefully be useful to some of you out there as well.
Parents’ involvement
On day 1 & 2, parents were allowed to observe their kids during recess time, which is kind of reassuring. However, the canteen was literally a war zone, with teachers trying to herd their classes to the allocated tables, before the assigned P4 buddies guided their newbies to buy food. The queue was horrible, and many kids (including mine) barely had 5 min to eat before being rushed up to the school hall. This led to me prepping snack boxes for my kid so she can skip the queue and have more time to eat. This continued until week 3 when she requested to buy from the canteen. There’s no more overcrowding, so perhaps it was due to the P4 buddies initially. Nonetheless, having P4 buddies was a great idea and helped the kids ease into P1.
In addition to this, the school had many other engagements with parents, including:
- breakfast with the principal on day 1, to welcome everyone on the journey, and to elicit parents’ help as partners in educating our young ones
- parenting workshop by an external trainer on helping children (and parents) to cope with the transitional stress
- curriculum briefing in week 3 to give parents greater insights into the school’s goals and methodology for each subject
- curriculum workshops for each subject, to teach parents how to support and complement their child’s learning back at home
This is in stark contrast with my own P1 experience (the bits I still recall anyway), where parents were pretty much hands off, and teachers caned misbehaving students. But I do believe my involvement is helping my kid enjoy school better, and it has worked out well so far.
Spelling and 听写
The English spelling list and Chinese 听写 list came on day 3, foretelling the tests in the weeks to come. There’s one of each literally every week, but I guess it’s in line with the shift towards continuous assessment, or holistic assessment as they call it. And there’s no mid year and final exams in P1, which is a welcomed change.
I don’t remember how I learnt spelling when I was a kid, but here’s how I’m helping my kid with it:
- Warm her up by getting her to copy each word 5 times. Ask her to write the last 2 while covering the earlier ones to exercise recall.
- Breakdown the phonemes with her, so she can correctly guess the spelling even if she doesn’t remember.
- Have regular short revisions or mock tests in the immediate 24 hrs. This is a memory technique for moving knowledge from the short term memory to the long term part of the brain.
Step 3 will help kids to pass tests, but it’s really step 2 we should try to achieve.
Prepare children for the tests of life, not a life of tests
This quote I saw at the curriculum briefing really struck a chord with me. I don’t remember what the speaker meant by this, but here’s my interpretation.
The goal of education is not about doing well in tests and exams, but to prepare our children for the challenges they will face later in life. This means that we should focus on helping kids understand core concepts behind the things they’re taught in school, instead of purely memorizing to pass tests. Here’s a few examples off the top of my head:
- Firm grasp of phonics and being able to read and spell any word, instead of just memorizing the weekly list of words
- Applying mathematical concepts in real life, like calculating how much change to get back from the canteen uncle
- Fixing their own toys by putting a paper clip to close the circuit to complement the rusted spring connector
Like it or not, life will keep throwing challenges at our children, most of which wouldn’t have been taught in school. The best thing we can do as parents is to give them a safe environment to fail and learn in. Having said that, I’m not sure if I’m ready to let my kid fail the spelling tests yet. The school is not exactly a safe environment to fail in.
That’s it for now, and but I’ll be writing more about my experiences as we go along. Thanks for taking time to read this and I hope it has been interesting. Do leave comments below if you have any parenting tips to share with me. Until next time! 😁
