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.

What is Success?

First, what is Success?

Its a noun for the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.
Therefore setting up an Aim or Purpose is very important to attain Success.


What is an Aim or purpose?

Lets dig into the Longman Activator Thesaurus and you find these:-

aim: something you hope to achieve by doing something: The main aim of the plan was to provide employment for local people.

purpose: what you want to achieve when you do something; the reason you do or plan something, and the thing you want to achieve when you do it: The games have an educational purpose.

For most people, your aim or purpose is your Dream! if you Hope to achieve it, its an aim. 

If you want to achieve your Dream, then its a purpose.

So What is your Dream? List them down now.

1)

2)

3)

Now please check your aim or purpose against the following S.M.A.R.T guidelines.

Secondly, you need to break down the big aim to smaller aims with a time frame.

Lastly you need to take action!

There are a lot of myths about success but the following picture tell you all.

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.