PSLE – four dreaded letters that all Singaporeans are only too familiar with. This is how the Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board (SEAB) defines it: “The Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) is an annual national examination that is taken by candidates at the end of their final year of primary school education, in Singapore.” Nothing scary about it, right? And yet this is THE exam that strikes fear and worry in many (most?) parents’ hearts. Even those who claim not to be academically driven would have worried about it at some point in their lives if they were truly honest about i ..read more

When you juggle multiple things and especially when you reach a certain vintage (ahem!) you really should get a planner of some sort to write things down. Our brains should be used for thinking and processing, not for storing information like when to pick the boy up or what groceries you need to buy to cook dinner. Use A Planner But the place we keep such information needs to be a secure place so that we will not expend energy worrying about where this information is kept (scraps of paper/post-it-notes/our palms). Hence the need for a planner of sorts. I received this revelation from reading D ..read more

As our fifth child is slowly but surely taking off reading independently, I thought it would be nice to share with you how I have handled teaching our children to read in our homeschool. Teaching Our Children to Read Through the Years Through the years, I have taught our children to read using no curriculum (first and second child), to using the Christ-Centered Curriculum and Explode the Code (third to seventh child) and then moving on to using the computer-based Funnix programme (sixth and seventh child). I must say that it is highly rewarding to be the one who helps a child decode word ..read more

It is JUNE! Wherever you are, if you are using the Gregorian calendar, June marks the end of the first half of the year. So…how has it been? Do a Mid-Year Review This is a great time to do a mid-year review and do a stocktake of what’s happened so far. Moving ahead, I am sure most of us need to tweak things to get to the end of the year triumphant. Hopefully, you are not giving up on the year. Although some days that’s what I feel like doing. And hopefully, we have not all forgotten what we had set out to do at the beginning of the year. Whether you are busy or are feeling too dreary to do an ..read more

Freedom within structure in our homeschool? Is that possible? if so, how can we plan in such a way to allow both freedom and structure to co-exist? Actually, should we even bother to try? Aren’t they like oil and water? Freedom in Homeschooling If you have been homeschooling for a while, you know and enjoy the freedom it gives us. We get to decide stuff like: when to start school: 8am? 10am? 2pm? what to do for school: Nature walk? Deskwork? Go on a learning journey at the Science Centre? Memorise poems? where we want to do school: Park? Poolside? Bed? Responsible Freedom But there is a flip ..read more

I used to think that once the children grew up, life would get less busy. But it has not been so. Instead, I seemed to have exchanged one kind of busy for another. Plus, like it or not, age has forced me to slow down so I am less productive than I had been. Fewer Interruptions When I had all littles, interrupted sleep was a given and so were interrupted shower times and mealtimes. But now that I have bigs, middles and smalls, uninterrupted showers and mealtimes are usually a given. Uninterrupted sleep not so but definitely I get more uninterrupted sleep than before. Well, until perimenopause h ..read more