Dear Parents, have you come across these commonly given feedback on your child's answers in Science open-ended questions; "The answer is not to the point", "The concept is not present in the answer" "The answer is not structured well" ... Often, this is a result of your children understanding a concept or topic but being unable to express themselves to attain the marks they deserve.

Here are some tips that your child may find useful in helping them structure their answers. Please understand that these tips are not exhaustive and may not encompass all open-ended questions. Nevertheless, I have found it quite useful when helping children to structure their Science open-ended answers.
 

Here are some common sentence structures your child can adopt when answering open-ended questions. They can use the question stems and the context to help them identify the sentence structures.
 

‘What’ Questions are often questions that test your child on identifying the correct fact. The words that identify these questions are as follows.

Spotting careless mistakes in your child’s work is a common but frustrating occurrence for many parents, especially if these mistakes cost marks in an important assignment or during the examinations.

And I’m sure many parents have well-intentionally reminded their children to “Be more careful with your work” or “Remember to double-check after you finish” And yet, these reminders do not seem to work much effect.

Well, besides reminders and patience, we can adopt a more ACTIVE approach to nip this issue in the bud and empower the child to build the ability and keen-ness towards details and ‘subtle’ differences in his/her work.

The art of making small talk with strangers is fast disappearing as more and more people prefer to communicate through social networking site Facebook, reveals a new survey.

The survey carried out by organic tea brand Clipper revealed that two-thirds of Britons regularly talk to people on Facebook who they would never see in person.

A staggering 70 per cent of the 1,000 people polled said they thought the art of conversation was dying because of texting, email and social media.

A third would strike up a conversation with a stranger only if they were lost and needed directions, and just over half said they see the same people every day on the way to work, at lunch or walking the dog.

But four out of 10 said it would be "weird" to say hello, while others said they were shy or "could not think of anything to say", so ignored them.

The problem is particularly bad among those aged under 30, with 58 per cent saying they avoid talking to people they see often, but do not really know.

In a typical school environment, we often determine a child’s academic potential and achievement based on whether he can complete the assignments given, the quality of the answers given in class and the marks he managed to score for his examinations (this  is often the one most important determinant teachers and parents use to assess the ‘potential’ of a child).

However, this perspective of analysing a child’s potential to learn prevents us from truly understanding what a child is capable of. We are merely seeing and judging the child’s ability from a final grade or marks scored for a particular subject.

Most children do not know how to build tension, their stories tend to jump from one point to the next or they tend to solve the problem too quickly and as a result the stories are not gripping.

Example:

I heard a creaking sound in the house. I wandered
downstairs and saw, to my horror, a masked man. He must be a burglar! I stood rooted to the ground, I was shaking with fear. The burglar suddenly turned and saw me. He advanced towards me and then he caught me and gagged me.

Being able to pay attention in class and not be distracted by the surroundings or the other classmates is a key skill that we want our children to have. It helps them maximise their learning in class when they are able to focus and take in the content that the teacher is teaching.

However, our classrooms can be a noisy place filled with distractions for a child who is not equipped with strong attentional skills. We have the teacher talking in front of the class, a classmate drops a pencil or another child is rocking his chair or someone just walked past the corridor.

But, with practice and time we can actually train up a child’s attentional abilities and improve his persistence to stay on task.

Firstly, we need to understand that there are different kinds of attention needed for learning:

For some children who read a lot and can pick up the grammar subconsciously, grammar will seem easy for them. However for many children, while they may be able to understand the easier grammar items, they have difficulty in understanding the more complex ones.

Here is a short explanation on the difference between the past perfect tense and past tense.The past perfect tense is used mainly when there are 2 actions and one action happened before another action.

"It's about a dog who is very smelly becos he doesn't like to bathe. His nemesis is Great Aunt Bleach (GAB) who likes to clean everything and never shys away from a challenge. The books are typically about the cleaning war between GAB and Smelly Bill (and sometimes plus his gang) - GAB usually emerges the winner. 

Books are written in a rhyming style with big fonts, colourful pictures, and picturesque words. My 3y/o and 6 y/o kids loved it becos it's full of action and drama (I had to read the warring parts thrice for my kids in 1 sitting). Books not thick, can finish easily in minutes." hquek