PSLE Chinese Oral Topics

Every year PSLE Oral test pupils for their spoken Chinese language, and I do collect those oral topics but they are not complete yet.

PSLE Chinese Oral from 2017 to 2018

2017 Day 1
(Neighborhood Relationship)

Neighbors placing obstacles along the corridor

Keeping school corridor clean

Day 2

(户外活动 Outdoors Activities)

Video showed the characters riding bicycle, blowing bubbles, having pinic.
What are the advantages of outdoor activities
Should Schools encourage students to carry out outdoor activities (+ why/why not)

Year 2018

Day 1

 (Seeking help/Learning from friends)

旁述：同学之间应该互相帮助，关心友爱
- What would you do if you are the boy (facing difficulties with his work)?
- Do you think friends are the best/good source of help/learning? Why?
- Give examples of how friends can help each other? 
- How would you react when your friend points out your mistakes/weaknesses you?
- Share an experience in which you learnt from your friend.

1.如果你是录像中的男孩，你会和他一样那么做吗？
2.你会有什么感受？
3. 在课室里，你能怎么帮助同学？
4. 你希望同学怎么帮助你？
5. 你还能怎么帮助别人？你需要注意些什么？
6. 你赞同朋友之间互相学习是最好的学习方法吗？

Day 2
{Library rules)

在图书馆里要注意自己的言行举止。
两个男生，先是在图书馆里吃喝，然后又吵闹，被图书馆管理员批评，道歉。

如果你是那两个男生，你会有什么感受？
你的学校图书馆有什么规则？
你的学校图书馆是怎么确保大家都遵守规则的？
如果你是那两个男生，经过这件事后，你会在图书馆里遵守规则吗？

今天口试题目：关于在一所中学的图书馆里遵守规则。

旁白：在图书馆，学生应该注意他们的行为。
场景
1. 几名男学生在图书馆里吃零食、喝饮料
2. 图书馆管理员上前提醒学生们不能在图书馆里饮食
3. 男学生们立即把食物和饮料收起来。继续看漫画书、哈哈大笑、聊了起来
4. 女学生们在图书馆里复习功课，男学生在那里吵闹，女生们感到很恼怒
5. 女学生走到图书馆管理员面前投诉男学生
6. 管理员上前提醒学生们要保持安静

问题
1. 如果你是那两个男生，你会有什么感受？
2. 你的学校图书馆有什么规则？
3. 你的学校图书馆是怎么确保大家都遵守规则的？
4. 如果你是那两个男生，经过这件事后，你会在图书馆里遵守规则吗？

Good luck......

The 3 steps to scoring in PSLE Chinese?

The 3 steps to scoring in PSLE Chinese?

1) Do something Chinese everyday!

Study 3 words, know their word formation, its hanyu pinyin, its word pair (aka 配词), and how to use them in sentences via 造句. This helps in the overall word recognition and builds vocabulary necessary for all papers. best if you read the words 7 times and write them 7 times. 7 is the magic number to remember things and repeat it enough times for long term memory.

2) Read a good paragraph everyday and try to memorize them. Reading is not a good way to study, memorizing and dictation is better. But memorizing and applying them in compo is even better! Application of knowledge can help make boring things interesting.

(hint: write a paragraph everyday.)

3) read aloud the textbook passages everyday, this exercise builds a sense of language which is lacking in most students.

So good day for all and hope you learn something - do something Chinese Everyday will help you improve your grades.....REALLY!

From Posts in my Facebook Group

What is your goal in PSLE 2018?

People and students often tell me what happened in their holidays and their dream school. I am glad that life is well for them.
However, staying in the comfort zone will not lead to better results, Its determination and persistant effort to improve everyday that creates better result.
Are you satisfied with your results, if no then
what is your goal for PSLE 2018?
Goals help one find out what they want, and from there you find out how to get there.

Last year I forgotten to reveal the one little thing about success, that success leaves a trail and a mentor would be best for students to get the success they want.

A mentor could be your parents, your friends or even your teachers. So aside from setting a goal, get a mentor to lead you the path with less struggle.
There is 3 kinds of knowledge:
1) those that you know,
2) those that you know you need to learn and 
3) those that you do not know.

Of the 3 types of knowledge, its the knowledge that you do not that will help you the most as those knowledge are some thing that you will never discover if not your mentor.

A mentor had gone the path you want to success in and had success with it, They can tell you something that you do not know and help you avoid the traps and harness your hidden talents.

“

One of the greatest values of mentors is the ability to see ahead what others cannot see and to help them navigate a course to their destination.      

John C. Maxwell

So in conclusion, you see scientist had great mentors, artists had great mentors, even great thinker had mentors. for example, Warren Buffet the greatest investors in US learnt from Benjamin Graham.
"Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing and one of Buffett's professors at Columbia Business School. "Ben Graham was certainly the man who set me on the course that's worked now for a good many years," Buffett says." CNBCSep 29, 2017 

How about Albert Einstein? He credits his mentor Konstantinos Karathodoris,
"We all know about Albert Einstein, the founder of the theory of relativity but how about the person who taught him and showed him the way to a bright scientific journey which would change the world? That was his teacher, Konstantinos Karathodoris. During one of his last pubic appearance Albert Einstein said, “You ask me to answer to all sorts of questions, but no one has ever wanted to know who was my teacher, who showed me the way to the higher mathematical science, thought and research. I simply say that my teacher was the unrivaled Greek Konstantinos Karatheodoris, to who we owe everything…” Indeed, it was a Greek from Thrace. He has not only been in touch with Einstein but has also helped him to complete the theory of relativity. "

In Chinese saying, the teacher leads the way to the door, whether the student is successful depends on each student. 

One way to be successful in PSLE 2018 is to find out and put 7 habits into your life. Good luck!

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

the road to PSLE 2017 : What are the most important yet not urgent things to improve your T score?

Important yet not urgent things are the most important things to do to improve your child's scores in the coming PSLE and yet a lot of parents and children totally missed the point.

First What is T score and How to roughly figure out your child's PSLE T score?

PSLE T-score from yapsmail

 From pamela, you find a simple formulae to compute your child's T score in minutes

"So how do you estimate the T-score of your child?  

You can do that easily if you can get more than 40 random marks from a school with the same exams (or all the marks in one school). 

 If you key that into an excel spreadsheet, you can pretty much generate the mean and standard deviation. Some schools provide the mean and standard deviation for each subject to parents.  

Do the calculation of the T-score using the formula given above using the mean and s.d.  Repeat that for 4 subjects and viola!  You can get the T-score of your child within that school. 

And since your sample size is greater than 40, is random and is a normal distribution, your chlid's T-score is pretty reflective of his/her T-score for PSLE." 
from https://www.facebook.com/notes/pamela-lim/psle-t-score/249665928428075/ 

Secondly YOU need to understand everyone has urgent or important things to do but you have limited time. So you need to classify those activities and prioritize them.

This is the urgent vs Important Matrix

 And this is the

Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Principle

In a 1954 speech to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was quoting Dr J. Roscoe Miller, president of Northwestern University, said: "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." This "Eisenhower Principle" is said to be how he organized his workload and priorities.

He recognized that great time management means being effective as well as efficient. In other words, we must spend our time on things that are important and not just the ones that are urgent. To do this, and to minimize the stress of having too many tight deadlines, we need to understand this distinction:

• Important activities have an outcome that leads to us achieving our goals, whether these are professional or personal.
• Urgent activities demand immediate attention, and are usually associated with achieving someone else's goals. They are often the ones we concentrate on and they demand attention because the consequences of not dealing with them are immediate.

When we know which activities are important and which are urgent, we can overcome the natural tendency to focus on unimportant urgent activities, so that we can clear enough time to do what's essential for our success. This is the way we move from "firefighting" into a position where we can grow our businesses and our careers.

1) Important and urgent is where most firefight takes place and it is best avoided by doing the important but not urgent things first.

In PSLE, that would be your studying load, one would need to schedule the load and distribute the study load to different time period so that you can finish them. Some just avoid the pain of studying till the last minute and you would have a very huge study load in a very short time span.........avoid this by spreading out the studying load over a period of time and you will not have important and urgent things.

2) Important but not urgent things are things that help you achieve your goals including learning and planning activities. 

In PSLE that would be planning the study time and study load so that you spread out the study load over time and into manageable chunks of data.

3) Not important and urgent things that stops you from achieving your aims. delegate or reschedule them or outsource them.

Not important and urgent things are your chores, house cleaning or school CCA etc,

4) Not important and not urgent things are your games your leisure activities, during preparation for PSLE, you need to forgo them till PSLE ends.


Three real important things to study for PSLE Chinese is:-

1) Read and reread all the chapters in the textbook everyday. This builds your vocabulary, language sense and recitation skills all at the same time is enjoyable.

If you had trouble reading the texts, go to xuele. choose the level and chapter and they will read the text for you. Go ahead and listen to the texts a few times and start reading along the voice a few times and then you will be able to read a few sentences at a time.

If you are weak in Hanyu PinYin, be sure to include them in the writing.

If you are weak in meaning of words, do check up the dictionary and write down the meaning.

2) Find a composition book and study all the compositions, memorized them and later use the pictures to attempt to write a similiar essay. Then you compare your composition with that of the book and figure out the things that you lack to score.

Common things to help you score in compositions
a) Good phrases and good expressive words 好词佳句
b) achieve 0 wrong words with repeated writing of the spelling list from primary 4 to 6.
c) get 0 grammer mistake by reading all the essays that you can get including the essays in the test papers of the different schools. And try to learn from them by writing similar essays.

As you properly notice....practice and study hard is quite necessary to score A*.


3) Listen to Chinese songs, TV programmes and Radio shows do help in listening skills.


4) Write, write and write a composition everyday, with practice comes results.