Last Friday Sophie received her first piece of homework from her Chinese teacher. Judging from the note that 老师 wrote, it sounded like this will be the first of many more homework to come.
And how did Sophie take to it? With much enthusiasm, I’ll say.
When I picked her up from the childcare centre last Friday, she told me excitedly, “Mummy, I have homework from 孙老师 and I have to do it on星期六.”
Granted that it’s only a simple revision of Chinese strokes for her to practice at home, I wonder how the path ahead for her will be as we prepare her for primary one in less than 3 years time.
When we attended a talk conducted by her childcare centre earlier this year, they shared about the curriculum and how they were gearing the kids up for formal education in all aspects from academics to character building to inculcating personal responsibilities. To be honest, when they shared about the lesson syllabus, a lot of them sounded foreign to me and I thought how am I ever going to be able to coach Sophie in future.
Falling into the KS trap with my assessment books for Sophie
While the school is preparing her academically, I try not to overload her with too much studying and instead turn my attention on teaching her life lessons that she’ll need in future.
When she was learning to ride her strider and fell countless times, I taught her that learning can be difficult at first. But if we try and try again, we’ll get better with practice.
When she’s packing her snacks for her class excursion, I’ll always pack more for her to share with her friends to teach her that it’s more blessed to give and share what you have.
When she tried rock climbing for the first time, we were cheering her on and giving her confidence that we’ll be near to catch her if she falls.
As a mum, my hope is to teach her
To be more confident of herself.
To be resilient and get back on her feet when she falls.
To always be curious about the world around her and have an open mind to ideas.
But most importantly, to always love what she does and have lots of fun!
What lessons are you teaching your kids today?
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Tagged: education, education system, life's lessons, Singapore, values
I am teaching my elder girl with the strider too! How is Sophie finding it?
Sophie’s pretty good at it and zooms around very fast. We bought it for her about a year ago and just yesterday we bought a pair of inline skates. So she’s picking that up.
Oh my, I had trouble reading that note from Sophie’s teacher! Bubs school hasn’t (or doesn’t, I’m not sure) given homework yet but she keeps asking me when she will be getting some as she feels it is a grown-up thing to have! I wonder if this enthusiasm will last when she actually gets homework in the future!
You are doing good in focusing on important life lessons!
Trust me, I swing between getting all nervous and anxious about her studies and trying to be chill about it. I just hope she’s able to maintain her enthusiasm for studying and homework as she has a long long way ahead of her.
I think you’re on the right track Susan 🙂 Cute that Sophie is still enthusiastic about homwork — long may it continue! Incidentally I flipped bought the K1 version of that Jumbo book for Noey to keep him occupied in Australia. I thought it was rather difficult!
Yes, the assessment books are getting quite tough for their standard. I just hope that I will not be too caught up with Sophie just getting the correct answers but also cultivate the joy of learning.
I bought some simple assessment books for Dana to try in her spare time too…I realised she enjoys Science and Math quite a bit. The exposure is good and I don’t set a rigid timetable where she must complete certain number of pages per day. She will pick the book(s) up to doodle when she feels like it 🙂
We have very limited time on weekdays but we try to have simple learning be it doodling on the new white board I got her or doing these assessment books. At four, we can still afford to be chill about it but I do hope to be better equipped to coach her when she starts formal school.
Over in the US, Nat gets his homework folder (at Kindergarten level) and he gets a week to finish them. Usually, it’s less than 5 sheets of Maths & Eng. Something which he can finish at one go (or I insist). And his teacher told me – let them do it over a few days. Haha. What a difference right?
Though, I have come to realise, it is a good habit to get him to sit down for at least half hr everyday to do some writing or work at some maths before he gets the whole afternoon to play. I think my mantra is not so much as to “teach him ahead of what the teacher is teaching” but to instil discipline in him, to sit down and focus and try his best to write (it’s SO HARD to get him to do so).
Yes, I’ve not been very patient with Sophie as she’s easily distracted when I’m teaching her. So I do need to learn how to capture hee attention so that I don’t feel like I’m talking to the wall :p
How is the US education system here different from Singapore? I reckon there is more emphasis on creative learning, exploration, etc than on grades.
I think those are good hopes for lil Sophie, Susan! Thanks for such a meaningful post. Backing you all the way… 😉
i think these are great advice! thanks for sharing. i had a conversation about a topic like this with the husband. i don’t think i can teach my kids the academic stuff given how MOE keeps/will be changing the system. so i rather leave that to teachers/tutors and we will teach him the lessons in life instead.
[…] with homework from her Mandarin teacher. And just when I thought she was so excited at the idea of doing homework, this week she kept whining and telling me that she didn’t know how to write the Chinese […]