Thank you for the information given to me in the Getting to Know Your Child form. It has helped me to understand your child better and will enable me to better aid her in her learning and growth. Thank you for all the affirming adjectives used to describe your child. It makes me glad to see that my girls are growing in nurturing homes with encouraging and loving parents. 




Your comments have also helped me to understand the expectations you have for your daughter and gave me insight into the methods I could use to motivate your child. Many of you have requested for 'Engaging and Fun activities' and 'Drilling and Repetition Practices' to be conducted in lessons. I will try my best to integrate both elements in my instruction procedures to ensure that the children are given inspiring yet exam-focused lessons in the year. 

We started the week with a blast with the learning of the process of inference-making. Using our hilarious class production (2014), the pupils are introduced to the steps taken in inference-making. 

This video is unlisted and will not be available on search engines or public walls. 

Information gathering

Knowledge:Linking Information gathered to background knowledge

Conclusions drawn

The girls were then provided with several media sources: TV Commercial, advertisements and Public advocacy poster and were asked to determine the CONCLUSION, MESSAGE, INTENT of the characters in the media sources.

Such an activity is not merely an engaging or fun one. Familiarity with media sources is especially essential in helping pupils to cope with the new PSLE Stimulus-Based Conversation Component where they would be given a wide variety of visual sources: Pamphlets, Schedules, Adverts and asked to comment on their validity, effectiveness, appeal. The pupil's ability to make connections, evaluate, make conjectures and counterarguments will distinguish her from pupils who merely provide mundane analysis of the source. 




In the exercise assigned, I told pupils to determine the message of the advert and list the clues that enabled them to draw their conclusions. This allows me to understand the extent to which pupils are able to 1) Identify the right type of information for inference-making and 2) Make conclusions based on the information provided. 

The pupils will subsequently be required to apply inferential skills as they attempt their comprehension questions. 

P5/P6

Comprehension Lesson

Our first comprehension lesson was a highly-scaffolded one. Pupils are introduced to the steps taken when handling the Comprehension passage and were introduced to 4 research-based reading comprehension skills that will aid them in their learning. 

The four skills are: 

1) Visualisation --> Being a director; thinking about how the scene would appear in a movie. 
2) Questioning --> Determining the intent, feelings, thoughts of the characters. 
3) Evaluation --> Evaluating the personality and actions of characters 
4) Referencing --> Cataphoric and Anaphoric referencing to aid understanding. 





Compo Pre-Assessment 

The girls had their first Composition Pre-test this week to help me to ascertain the level of skill the children have acquired in writing and to plan lessons to guide them to overcome their weaknesses. 

Before the test, the children were 'recruited' by the CIA to identify the mistakes children make in their writing and to evaluate its relevance to the question given. 








Following that, they were given guidelines on how they could avoid the mistakes the children have made.

Finally, the children were given 45 minutes to complete writing task. 




Whoo Hoo Quizzes



The girls did their first Whoo Hoo Quiz this week. The Whoo Hoo Quiz will be conducted weekly to reinforce the pupils' skills in Grammar MCQ and synthesis. The quiz gives the pupils ample exposure to a wide variety of examination questions and prepares them to answer challenging questions in the examinations. The questions are retrieved from past year papers of high-performing primary schools in Singapore. 

Through my experience, the Whoo Hoo quiz has enabled my P5s to excel in the Synthesis component and in fact, they have done better than their peers in the section because of the weekly exposure given. 

These are the highlights of the week! 

Have a brilliant week and...
Regards,
Miss Grace Chua