First Case studies of success 2017

Boy A was from a neighborhood primary school in Singapore and he has not passed composition and paper 2 in primary 4. When We get together to assess the situation at the end of primary 5, he was not too optimist about even passing paper 1 and paper 2. But from his eyes, I see a desire to achieve success in his PSLE.

So I make it very clear from the start that only hardworking pupils will make it, he was not comfortable but he said firmly, "I will get an A!"

So we went through the process of goal setting, target setting and every week we will review what need to be done and celebrate what had been done. He was not too hopeful back then but he carried out all his work diligently week after week.

He studied the word lists in primary 5 and 6 textbooks word by word, writing notes on their meaning, character and hanyu pinyin. He would repeat this process every month and continue to revise those words now and then. And every week we would go through those words and nouns and practice on reading those textbook passages repeatedly.

After 3 months, His composition almost passed and his paper 2 showed improvement especially section A MCQ where he got a pass 26/50.
(If you can write a composition with less grammar mistake, less sentence construction mistake and less misspelling then you have half won the battle.)





Then our focus turned to composition where he would write a composition every week, memorize a list of phrases and nouns and to try to memorize a good composition week after week.

The first composition is super hard, he was no used to memorizing so much content so we cut the composition into pieces of sentences. we started from the first sentence, then the second then the third and the last in the first paragraph. this process continued for several weeks until he got used to the process and the process got faster and faster. then we started to write the composition from memory.

Every week we learnt a new composition, read them out aloud and then memorized them. Then he was to write the composition using his own word words. Why not copy? well I have tried that and children tend to blindly copied everything and learnt nothing from it.


SA1 results shown that he not only passed paper 1 (24/40) and he passed paper 2 too. (I think its due to his expended vocabulary, his MCQ got 32/50.)

Then as July draws nearby, We again changed our focus to oral which is due mid September. There are 2 parts in oral, so we start to read out 5 oral passages weekly and hand in as audio clips via whatsapp or sms. He was delighted to hear his voice and I get to check on his process daily.

But He started to be nervous and felt pessimistic, falling for the weaker himself. I coach him on how to handle stress and fear. And he moved on.

Nearer oral, I practice with him the oral process and what the 3 questions would be. And I go through several topics which I think is very important for PSLE.

(Remember pre-oral I listed down the important contents(topics)

1) Keep our environments clean

2) Go Green, earth hour, recycling, reuse etc

3) Traffic safety

4) Healthy eating and living

5) Helping the needy, giving seats etc

6) Be independence like learn to cook, organizing school bags etc.

7) Values such as Responsibility, hardworking, Caring could be a topic too.

Well one of them is the oral topic!)

Prelims results was just released and he passed his composition and scored 42/50 for MCQ (topping his class). For section B, he got 28/40. So Prelim overall he got over 60% for Chinese Language. He was so happy with the result and he had never felt so much confidence with the subject. He will be ready when he is taking it on 2nd Oct.

Lastly, Use this book to check your child's understanding of Chinese Language in the coming PSLE.

(I'm the author of this book if you are not aware. Thank you. )

In conclusion, children need to take action on advise and not to do nothing except dreaming.
please contact me via my email
mrtan.sg@gmail. com

PSLE Oral, How to prepare for them? 3 tips to PSLE Chinese Oral

SA1 Oral is coming and video oral communication is quite new.

So how do we prepare for it?

These are 3 tips to help you in Chinese Oral SA1:-

1) Do read your textbook to familiarise with all the words that are going to be tested. And read from Da Mu Zhi and Dou Hao so that you can read out the words from memory.

NOTE: Read everyday for 5 minutes will help a lot in Recitation.

2) Train yourself Oral conversation description skills.

Try to describe the place you are in, the people that you see, the smell that you smell, the colours that you see and everything in the scene.

use more than 5 sentences full of good words and phrases

3) The shortest cut is to memorise 5 pictures and hope it comes out

A) Shopping center/MRT/corridor

B) Honest Act

C) Be Helpful

D) Green Acts that are earth friendly

E) Racial Harmony

more tips by the expert Mr Toh

Steps To PSLE Chinese, So what after CA1? Exam Analysis in a simple page

Last Year, Most Primary schools have changed their test format to something nearer to 2017 new Chinese Format, so CA1 is a gauge to the students ability to adapt to the new format quickly. Yes, last year's Primary 5 papers are not totally the new format so essentially your child is just taken the 2017 PSLE paper 2 for the first time.

Now Take your child's CA1 paper and break them into section A and B. Then fill up the remarks with your child.

Sect A OAS                       Marks Scored         Remarks (What Mistake made and how to correct?)

Item 1 yu wen yin yong       ______/30              __________________________________________

                                                                         __________________________________________

Item 2 duan wen tian kong  ______/10              __________________________________________

                                                                         __________________________________________

Item 3 yue du li jie 1           ______/10              __________________________________________

                                                                         __________________________________________

Total Section A                  ______/50             __________________________________________

                                                                        __________________________________________


Section B
Item 4 wan cheng dui hua   ______/8              __________________________________________

                                                                        __________________________________________

Item 5 yue du li jie 2          ______/32              __________________________________________

                                                                        __________________________________________

Total Section B                 ______/40             __________________________________________

                                                                        __________________________________________

Total marks                      ______/90             __________________________________________

                                                                        __________________________________________


Email me at mrtan.sg@gmail.com
Please identify yourself first and ask only one question.

And here are some common mistakes to take note in Section A!

1) Lack of knowledge of the words to be tested, either one is studying without understanding or one is not done much studying at all.

2) Cannot recognize the words either in the questions or the passages.

3) Lack of skills to extract answers from the passage via keywords in the questions and adapt the answers according to the question.

Common ways to score in Section A!

1) school spelling lists has been painstakingly compiled by teachers to help students score in section A but most students just ignore the spelling lists when they prepare their exams, this is a mistake. Most spelling lists has common word pairs like this one. And furthermore some spelling lists have a huge list of common useful phrases that are very helpful in compositions and oral.

Just by studying those spelling lists and memorizing them daily would benefit your child greatly.

2) Get your child to listen to the chapters in MOE's textbook reading website daily. its called
XUELE. Take a chapter every day and make sure your child listened N times till they can read out the text loud. You should start with the first chapter in primary 6 textbook and go all the way to the last and restart again. then go to the first chapter in primary 5 textbook till the last chapter. Then cycle back to primary 6 textbook chapter 1. Do it every day and your child will quickly know all the words required of him to read. This method is obviously not for the lazy and the inconsistent ones.

3) Alternatively read a sentence everyday from a composition book everyday. And no its not a joke, if your child can do that for 3 months at least, you will see results.

4) Take my Book and study the word list (on the first pages of every exercise) careful especially the part on meaning (意思), word pairs (搭配)  and sentences （句子）.

Its available in popular and other bookstores.

Common ways to score in Section B
1) Do read the questions carefully and highlight/underline the keywords, then using the keywords, go to the passage and find them out  (sometimes the questions do not paraphrase the passage sentence directly so your child have to understand the meaning well enough to find the sentences with similar meaning.) and highlight the answer. The final stage is the adaptation of the answers to answer the questions directly. most of the time your child has to correct use the pronouns “我”, 作者,你 correctly. Sometimes your child have to merge the sentences together with connecting nouns like 所以，因此，而且.

2) For the few Higher order thinking questions,  your child need to be learn three skills:-
(A) story telling skills. When questions asked about relevant personal experiences your child need to write a short account of the desired moral value. a short story with an introduction, a development and an ending would be enough. The point is the story must be relevant to the question.
(B) story extraction.Sometimes the questions does asked your child to refer to certain parts of the passage to illustrate certain values and your child should be able to quickly identify the relevant parts of the passage shifty..
(C) Application of values. Sometimes the questions is about how your child is going to apply the value in life. Your child should identify 2 to 3 ways (that are not in the passage) that your child can apply the value in life.

Lastly, I am going to talk about expectations which I am going to show in a table

Expected grade           Expected Section A Marks      Expected Section B Marks
A*                              50/50                                      31/40
A                                50/50                                      22/40
B                                50/50                                      15/40
C(pass)                       40/50                                      15/40

Without a good score in Section A, Its is very difficult to PASS (grade C) and score well in the paper 2. And with a perfect score in section A (50/50) your child had already passed! Section A is growing in importance this year onward.

Some useful resources

Past Year Test papers in 2016 

Testpapersfree.com

(disclaimer: I'm not advertising for the above website and I do not benefit in anyway if you click the above links.)

Email me at mrtan.sg@gmail.com
Please identify yourself first and ask only one question.
Thank you.

Forward to PSLE 2017 Chinese Step 1

Now is December Holidays and those Primary 5 students should start planning for PSLE Chinese 2017 now. As the saying goes,"Failing to plan is planning to fail." so now I'm here to outline a few steps to help your child succeed in PSLE Chinese.

The ten steps to success in PSLE Chinese 2017.

Step 1, Know thy enemies, understand oneself and the battle is half won

A) Do you know when the PSLE is going to happen?
Here is the document from SEAB MOE Singapore (dated 7 Dec 2016).















From the document, your child needs to be prepared for oral by August, Listening comprehension and all written papers, that is composition and paper 2 by September. So from now to September is about 9 months or about 270 days.

B) The next thing about the exam is that you need to know how much your child should know in order to be successful.

The first things your child have should be a good foundation and that includes at least 3 things:
Firstly, your child should have a good understanding of all the words as taught in the primary 4 to 6 textbooks. And your child should be able to use those words to form simple sentences correctly.
By the way, your child need to roughly know the workload which is about 400 words or 1000 words.
Most children will see the above number and felt its impossible. well lets be proactive, and assume your child want to know all of them in 4 months. Your child could study 1000/4/30=8.3 words every day for the 4 months.
So by studying 8 words every day, your child will revised 1000 words in 4 months. That looks more workable than studying 1000 words in 4 months.
Yes a lot of children do not know the tactics to get what they want. by simply divide the work loan into smaller workable pieces will help your child do a lot in a short time.
And a lot of parents said, "my child will forget what they learnt fast." well that's why this process should be revised constantly.

Secondly, your child should be able to write grammatically correct Chinese sentences with minimum spelling errors.
This involved both reading and writing. Reading helps to reinforce your child's understanding of sentence structure and grammar in the same time helps with word recognition and understanding.. while writing forces your child to put words in paper. Your child will need to form the sentences, verify them grammatically  and lastly write them down.
Conversation helps your child in their understand and usage of  those words in real time and it helps your child in their thinking processes.

Thirdly, your child should be well versed in expressive phrases and be fluent in oral conversations especially those common nouns and adjectives. And the ability to tell stories fluently is important too.
By reading well written compositions and learning the authors' word usage, your child will gain an understanding into the thinking processes which helps to form good sentences and what are the good words to use in certain situations.

C) Lastly, your child should have an idea about success in PSLE Chinese.
Is it a pass, or a A? your child should know what are they getting now and project a target that they can achieve or want to achieve.

Why set a Goal?
Children without a goal will lose focus very fast and sink into their habits and eventually be as good as they are now. Your child cannot improve by doing what they are doing now.

To do different things consistently requires your child to be accountable for their own results. Most children expect teacher and parents to do for them while they continue their bad habits, their results will almost be impossible to improve.

But I have to forewarn parents and children not to set an aim as high as 2 times your children's present grade. For example Linda got an D grade and aim for a pass, that's a aim that is achievable with some effort like 30 minutes a day revision. However, if Linda is to set a target of A, that is 2 grades higher than her present grade, She would need to prepare to study 10 times harder than her peers to achieve her target that is to spend 2 hours daily on her revision and drill exercises.There is no free lunch, if you desire result, then you have to give out luxuries in life to study.

Furthermore the goal should be your child's desired success.

I can help your child in Primary 6 or before that in their PSLE and help them maximize their potential in Chinese. I had been teaching and guiding children outdo themselves in psle for 10 years. Every  year I have students that got A or A* when they just passed a while ago. If you think I can help your child please drop an email at mrtan.sg@gmail.com for Mr Tan

Please use "A1 Chinese " follow by your name and email/tel no. Thank you. 

continue step 2 at a later date.

PSLE CL 2017 Part 1 Oral Video

Next year, MOE will bring the change of PSLE Chinese format in place.

Video in Oral vs Picture Oral and picture description+opinion vs 3 open-ended questions style oral
This year, MOE has test run the Video Oral programme in Secondary and Primary schools and using ICT to conduct Oral is a huge step to streamline PSLE examination ICT involvement.

Ok the main change in Oral format is the usage of Video to stimulate thinking and speaking. Video makes objects 3 Demensional, real time and that should helped pupils think it is easier. Well you have to think twice as there is a lot of details in the video that you have to pause and watch, most pupil missed the point the go ahead anyway, to get trapped in the their egoistic mind. Yes you cannot just watch the video once and be confidence of taking the examinations. There are more than meets the eyes details in the video that is missed by the untrained eyes.

3 Details often missed by pupils:-
1) The moral of the video is always in the narrative at the first 5 seconds of the video, you want to make sure you truly understands this narrative. pupil always need to remember at least 3 things that happened in the video.

2) The 3 main questions are almost asked in order but the questions asked may varied according to the teacher asking and the pupil taking the examination.

3) The highest mark goes to the pupil who is familiar to the words and phrases used in that kind of situations in the video and most will require pupil's to be able to tell a story that had happened in his life which could be fabricated.

Please contact me if you need help in helping your child to be ready for PSLE.CL.
mrtan.sg@gmail.com.