2020 has been an extra-ordinary year for most. For my case, it has an added dimension of another layer of parenting woes – the PSLE.
The kid was not as engaged online learning as compared to
physical classrooms and we had to work through gaps in the last few weeks leading
up to the national exam. During those 2 months, I have sat through quite a bit
of webinars and devised different revision plans as well as flipped through
many different guidebooks and assessment books.
I thought that it would be useful to share them with you in
a few posts split into the different subjects. đ
:: English
This has always been Dumpling’s pet subject and while we did
not have to revise as much, there are a few elements in this subject that I wish
to highlight.
1. Oral
Oral is a great way to earn marks if your child is confident,
reads widely and is able to contribute to conversations meaningfully. However,
for some children, having the context to talk about and the vocabulary bank
bring about another set of challenges.
There are a few areas which I think would be important for
us to highlight to our children.
- - Read and speak slowly and clearly
- Be mindful of the ending consonants and expressions.
Can the examiner hear the “t” and the “th”? Is the dialogue in the form of a question? Was the character speaking in anger? Model those feelings accordingly.
- 2. Stimulus based conversation
Instead of leaving it to the last
minute to prepare for this section, I think it would be a good practice to engage
your child and have casual conversations about a menu, poster or an
advertisement.
“Would you be keen to purchase
the carton of oat milk? Why and why not?” and if the visuals are food related,
they usually are linked to health themes. “Have you tried oat milk before? How
do you think we should maintain a healthy lifestyle?”
Of course, in our conversations
with them, the discussions are more casual, but the idea is to get your child
comfortable in sharing and commenting as the less the examiners prompt them, the better.
(Note: Listening comprehension is also a tad trickier at P6 where the questions often times require deeper thinking and do not have as many "direct questions" like the lower levels. For e.g. they may describe a sequence / a path and the question may require the child to think in the reverse order of the sequence. Hence it would be good to have some practices in this too.)
2. Synthesis and Transformation (S&T)
This gave me nightmares when the kiddo was in Primary 5 and
for the first time, did badly in a paper component for English.
With S&T, it is what I refer to as a “sudden death” –
you either get the full 2 marks or you get 0, hence it would be very easy to lose 5 - 6 marks in this section.
There are extremely strict rules regarding S&T – if the subject is in a plural form, it must stay in a plural form. For instance, if the question listed “apples” then after transforming the sentence, it has to be same – “apples”.
I noted that in most past year papers, reported speech (direct to indirect speech) seems to an area which is always tested on. On this area, the child needs to follow the “TPTP” rule and Lil But Mighty has a great post here.
There are not many S&T books available at the bookstore.
Here’s a book
which you may find useful where it explains the rules, connectors, etc., and
provides practices after. I understand that some local schools also has this title listed in their supplementary / recommended lists too.
