Just read an article today on parents sending their kids for tuition. With the GEP selection tests this month, some even send their kids for $200 a session to get trained for them.

Speaking as a mom who has a kid going through the first year in GEP, I would like to share my experiences and why I strongly advise against training for these tests in order to get into GEP.

My child was highly excited about the GEP selection tests, not because we had put any emphasis on it, but more from his peers in school at that time. I suspect it was a measure of 'how smart they are' when they compared among themselves.

First month in GEP seems to be a breeze. Homework seems to be rather minimal, though rather interesting.

First 3 days were orientation; getting to know the new school, new friends, new teachers, rules etc. Though it took me a while to realise where the water coolers were, I finally realised that there is a water cooler outside every toilet on every floor. So blur...

English teacher is a very nice man. He lets us compose 'rubbish'. I combined all sorts of funny words together to come up with my own nouns and verbs! My marks for my first composition was not good, maybe the teacher expects more now.

Maths is much more fun than before. We get to learn the different numeration systems, like Mayan, Egyptian etc. But the teacher does not provide us with everything, we need to do a lot of research on the internet ourselves. Sometimes, my mummy will ask me what topic is this, but I really don't know?

In our pursuit for the best for our children, do stop and ponder over this.

"Why do you have to be like the others?"

All of us want the best for our children, but what is the best for the child when it comes to choosing a primary school? I think a lot of people will answer that they want a good school for the child. But what is the good school for most people may not be a good school for your child.

I notice that a lot of parents will see whether the school had good PSLE results, whether there is any affiliation to any secondary school etc. Personally, I had a different set of criteria:

Getting a child to write on a regular basis is not easy. This gets increasingly difficult as he realises that it becomes additional work for him in place of his playing time.

When we go on a holiday, I make him write a short journal about the previous day's event. In this way, the events are still fresh in his mind and it is much easier to tackle to write a short article than to write about the whole holiday. This is done in the early mornings before we venture out. Another reason is also because he is an early bird and is my way of keeping him quiet when everyone else is still sleeping.

He did protest in the beginning but he is now used to it. No protest during our last holiday.

Do you transfer them to your computer, file them nicely into different folders or just transfer them and forget about it? Or even worse, continue leaving them in your digital camera or video camera until it is forgotten?

I have a friend who still diligently prints out all her holiday photos and compiles them into an album, just like she would do if she had taken photos with a film. Another friend just sent me a pdf file, whereby she copied all her photos and put them into Adobe so that she can put in text commentaries.

Having just read a forum thread about how we manage our time, I wonder how many of us actually spend enough time with our parents / elders.

In our daily madness rushing about, we have to split our time between our children, our spouse and our parents. I would dare say that we would spend the least time with our parents.

Recently, I came across a short video on youtube which is about a father and son's conversation.  This is a touching video which reminds us to spend time with our parents and to love them while they are still around.