School Matters

After experiencing Pri 2 and re-experiencing Pri 1 for 2.5 weeks, I am really glad Megan and Joseph are enjoying school. This is an answered prayer. Let me share some snippets here with you. :)

1. Meg's Work
Ok, she has homework everyday. She complains a little but I reckon that's probably becos her little brother has only had 3 pieces of homework since school started. :) So to make it fair, the TV stays "Off" till she's done with hers. There's "Ting Xie" every Tuesday. She's finished the first units of Math and English. Wrote her first composition "My favourite form of Transportation". And just had the very first "Show and Tell" yesterday. The topic was "My favourite local food", the little gal chose "Satay". Look at what we came up with creatively together! :DWe had real satay sticks poked through the paper and drew chunks of meat around them. :) An additional 3D effect! :) We drew the Ketupat and the satay sauce. She came up with 12 lines and memorised them all. I was told she did really well during the actual show and tell! :)

2. Joe's colour pencils
Over the years, we've started suspecting and have more or less confirmed that Joe suffers from a colour deficiency condition, more commonly known as "Colour Blindness". My elder brother suffers from the same condition too. We noticed that there are some colours he can't tell. Initially, when he started his art classes, he would not have the confidence to pick out the right colours. For example, he would sometimes choose purple when he wanted dark blue. Or when he wanted green, he chose brown. A few of his preschool teachers weren't alert enough to know that he might have this condition and he had actually been punished before for "colouring wrongly"!!

After seeing the pattern in his colouring mistakes, we realised that they were not done on purpose but if we had looked through his eyes, these were the actual colours he saw. So we trained him to ask for help, for example: "I'm looking for dark brown. Is this dark brown or dark green?" By and by, he's overcome this deficiency somewhat.

Now that he is in Pri 1, with a brand new form teacher and art teacher, I emailed them to let them know about his condition. Thank God his FT is so nice! She replied, "I enjoy working with creative pupils and will partner with you to help in in whatever ways he needs in this aspect." :D

She suggested also that we label his colour pencils as there are tasks in Math and English that require him to colour and colour in specific colours, for example: Colour the third umbrella in purple. I dunno why I never thought of doing that! haha... but yeah, today I got it done!


These colour pencils were a present from Aunty R. :) They're shorter than usual (which is good for his little hands). The set has a wide variety of shades for some of the colours. To help him to know which colour is which, we came up with labels like "Sky", "Veggy", "Grape", "Lemon" and "Cucumber Green". He's a visual boy, so using labels like these help him to get his colours right straight away! :)

3. Sharpening
It is no joke to sharpen their pencils and colour pencils almost every other day. Really. After using a good ol' traditional sharpener - one where you hold the lever and churn round and round, we decided to invest in an automatic one. haha... I dunno if we're very behind, if every family now owns one of these automatic sharpeners, but I think it's a great invention! You stick the pencil in, hold it tight and the battery operated device sharpens it to perfection in a few seconds flat. :)


4. Math and models

Remember how we had to draw models for our math problem sums? It's now made easier cos they now can use a stencil! This is how it looks like. :)

As you can see, now every rectangle can be drawn to scale, so much easier! I remember I used to dread drawing models, cos I find it difficult to get them right. With this stencil, Meg finds it much more manageable to learn and manage models and Math. :)