Join our ambassadors, Mark Lee and Suhaimi Yusof and venture out to our museums and other heritage venues as Explore Singapore! returns once again! This year, the annual campaign organised by the National Heritage Board carries the theme “Heritage Hop-About”, and boasts of over 20 activities held at over 15 museums and institutions. And for the first time, 27 monuments will be open to the public through 16 walking tours during Explore Singapore! 2011.

Quite a few parents have come to me with the question of whether they should send their children for abacus classes.  From my discussion with them, I gathered that on one hand, many are impressed with the apparent effect abacus classes have on the speed of doing mental sum; on the other hand, they have also heard stories of how children get confused as abacus method is vastly different from number bonds, which seems to be the method of choice being taught at primary level.

I thought I would take the opportunity to clarify on this and hopefully to reach out to as many parents as possible with regards to this confusion. 

What is Number Bond?

I am not ashamed to admit that I am a Potato Parent. I am not pleased to admit it... but I am not ashamed. See... I didn't get to choose how I was educated. Unlike many in Singapore, I was never given the opportunity to learn Chinese. I spent the better part of my childhood outside of Singapore. So, I learnt French instead.

My children have to learn Chinese. I am fully supportive of this. If the government decided to move away from bilingual education and people had the choice to take or not to take Chinese, I would still opt for my kids to take Chinese.

But Potato Children like mine find it really difficult to excel in the Chinese language because they do not evolve in a Chinese reading milieu. In the past 10 months, I have experimented with some Potato Methods for Learning Chinese and my son has made progress. In this post I would like to share some things I discovered about the process of learning Chinese - and why Potato Children like mine find the language almost impossible to master... and what parents can do to make the impossible possible.

Research in positive emotion (i.e., happy, excited, enthousiastic, joyful, elated) show that it aids

(1) recall of material learnt

(2) retention of material learnt

(3) creativity

(4) heightened attentiveness when risks are important to manage

As such, it is important to keep the child reasonably happy during the WHOLE process. Here is what I did...

(A) Keep My Daily Expectations Low

My son could do no wrong. He could only manage to recite 20 words at a time. So that was our target. Everytime he recited 20 words, I clapped and danced. I didn't care that once he had moved on to the 2nd chunk, he had already forgotten the first. This way, the whole process was peppered with small successes. Every chunk was a success.

(B) Use Physical Touch

Sometimes he sat on my lap to recite. I hug and kiss him a lot as he toils. I have a Magic Nose that I stick onto his cheek, telling him that energy is flowing from me to him.

The post on the motivational techniques I used to pull this off is here... http://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/content/motivational-techniques-chinese-compo-recitation. Please don't try and do what Little Boy and I did, without first reading that? Otherwise, it can be very traumatic for the child.

Little Boy memorized his very first Chinese composition last year in Nov-Dec 2010. We are now September 2011. It has been 10 months. The start was most onerous indeed. To describe the first 25 compo memorizations as long and hard toil, is perhaps an understatement. He could not recognize more than half the words in each compo. The compos were taken from a compendium of 1000 Best Compositions from the equivalent of China's PSLE. They were at least 3 to 4 years above his reading level then. Grandma read them into a digital audio file and Little Boy plugged in the speakers and listened and followed and memorized and recited to me.

Percentage is a topic that often throws a few curveballs in the way of phrasing. Many students are often confused in solving percentage questions as they cannot identify the true base percentage. Here are some examples to help illustrate this concept of base percentage to your kids.

Example 1: Percentage Increase
Karl had a 15% salary increase in starting from January.
Which of the statements is true?
Statement 1: Karl’s salary in December is 85% and his salary in January is 100%
Statement 2: Karl’s salary in December is 100% and his salary in January is 115%.

To solve this, we need to look at the base percentage, which is his salary in December. Statement 2 is correct as the increase in salary should be computed by adding the increase to the base percentage in December.

Example 2: Percentage Reduction
Kenny bought a bag which was 20% cheaper than Lina's bag.
Which of the statements is true?
Statement 1: Kenny's bag is 80% and Lina's bag is 100%
Statement 2: Kenny's bag is 100% and Lina's bag is 120%.

In a school learning environment, students are given many different types of academic tasks to assess their level of knowledge and understanding. And when we see a child’s performance in tasks such as spelling, mental sums, reading comprehension, problem sums, composition writing, oral conversation, reading, grammer,  etc, we are actually seeing a display of his/her ability to learn. 

And when a child shows difficulty in understanding what he/she has read or cannot make connections in the given questions; or displaying carelessness or needing repeated teaching and practice – that is usually an indication of some weaknesses in their learning abilities.