It is the information I sent out to parents in early April. It is still useful for parents towards the end of May (each year).
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We are now at the beginning of year 4. Soon, students will have to
be able to do difficult year 5 work at Mathemafix to have a chance for
the OC test in 2022. This means the foundation must be solid before
doing OC trials. Unfortunately, a lot of the kids don't have a solid
foundation and this means they will have to work on the foundation right
close to the OC test date and cram on the hard stuff. This is not
useful for long term performance and only helps a little in the OC test.
And it is unlikely to be able to get into any OC classes in Sydney.
This is why it's important to have a long term view and build the
foundation mainly for the selective school test in 2024.
The test series called OC Prep Readiness can help parents to quickly
diagnose their kids to see if they are ready for OC prep work. The
series covers the advanced level for year 3 students. If year 4 students
score poorly in this series, you know that they are not ready and would
not do well in OC prep and in the OC test. And this means parents need to
look for a long term goal of the selective test.
Peter
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Here
are a few things parents should check to make sure that the kids are on
the right track and building the required foundation suitable for high
performance. This is also part of the preparation for ICAS competitions
in term 3-4. By following what I describe here, parents can keep kids
very busy and learn a lot during year 4. Our goal is to achieve a solid
foundation and ultra high performance for the smart kids and a decent
foundation for the weak kids.
Mathematics
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1- Does your child know the math timetables well enough?
Go to the Timetables module and do the tests. The test level 6 is particularly as they cover table 6, 7 and 8.
They have to get 100% for all tests and be able to do each test which includes forward and reverse operations under 5 minutes.
2- Does your child have all the basic math in year 4 and 5 and the fraction part of the year 6?
Read
the Maths Lessons guide on page QUICK LINKS. Print out the tracking
sheets and go to the Maths Lesson module. Do all 32 year 4 weekly
revision tests, score over 90% in each test. Then go on to cover all the
year 5 maths online lessons using the normal tracking method as
described in the document Maths Lessons. Also do the year 6 fraction
topic.
3- Does your child have advanced year 3-5 maths problem-solving strategies and mental maths?
Download
and learn from the Maths Problem Solving Strategies Year 2-3 document
on page QUICK LINKS. Then study the document for years 4-5. The stuff in
these documents are very advanced. In fact, the document for year 4-5
takes students to the selective test level.
4-
On page Download, download some year 3 and 4 Singapore maths past papers
for the kids to do. The year 4 Singapore papers are even hard for top
year 5 students in Australia as their level is at least 1 year higher
than Australian school year.
English reading comprehension
1- Can your child consistently score over 85% for English comprehension grade 4 and over 90% for English reading skills grade 4?
If
not, go to the Reading Eggspress website and get a free trial account.
Do the placement test. Kids are often placed into year 2 level at this
age and it is alarming. It is highly recommended that kids should do
ReadingEggspress and reach the end of year 5 level by July. Do not rush.
They have to do the lessons properly and score over 90%. Kids are known
to treat Reading Eggspress as a silly game and randomly click on the
choices just to get through the lessons to please parents. They can do
one entire year of work in 1 week without understanding anything.
If kids do not get on ReadingEggspress, the Reading Library module has a
lot of ebooks for kids to read. Reading e-books and doing the quiz for
every chapter will help .
Parents should create a free account for the kids at the Read Theory
website and get them to do at least 3 quizzes per week. Strong readers
should reach grade 7 level and stay there by the time they get to June
of year 4.
2- Can your child spell and
write meaningful sentences? Can your child start to write a sentence
with two clauses or more? Can your child do proper punctuation and
recognise sentence structure, clauses, phrases and describe the job of a
phrase in a sentence?
You can check all
this by going to More ... and look for the Super Teacher worksheet
module and download worksheets for English. Get your child to do the
worksheets and read the writing.
Go to the module Punctuation in More ... and do some exercises.
Go to the module Writing Workshop and watch a bunch of video lessons there.
Do all NAPLAN language convention trials year 5
3- Can your child spell common words and some advanced words?
Use the Reading Eggspress spelling module. Mathemafix has a lot of spelling lists and the module Spelling to help.
Top
students can also start using the Advanced Word module at grade 4 level
to improve vocab. Also, when your child finishes a test in English, GA
and science, open the result and look for long words at the bottom of
the window. Add the unknown words into the Personal Wordlist and later
access them to learn inside the module Personal Wordlist.
4- Can your child write a simple narrative and persuasive writing task about 250 words in length?
The Writing Tools Kit on page QUICK LINKS will be very useful. Also, use the module Read Summarise Write
to practise copying ideas from simple stories up to 300 words in length
and rewrite the stories. Use the module Writing Planner to start
getting familiar with the narrative and persuasive format. Use the
Super Teacher Worksheets in More ... to get worksheets to practise
writing sentences to practise English expressions.
Science and technology
Year
4 students have to put a lot of time into English and maths to prepare
for the OC test. However, the top performers may have enough time to
spend on science, technology and general knowledge.
Parents
are highly encouraged to get kids to access Brainpop for science and
technology. It also has very good video lessons on various aspects of
English and humanities. This will greatly increase the general knowledge
of the kids along with English words. Parents should get their own
subscriptions to have 24/7 access. But it is fairly expensive. I have a
pool of 3 concurrent connections to Brainpop at both Junior and Senior
level. With a one-off contribution to the fee (check PAYMENT page), I
will grant access to this shared pool for the life of the Mathemafix
account.
Super Teacher Worksheets in More ... also has an enormous collection of
science and general knowledge worksheets for parents to use.
The Reading Library has a lot of ebooks for kids to read. Reading e-books and doing the quiz for every chapter will help .
Getting ready for OC trials
The
OC trials will be open soon. However, I only expect the top students to
do them while the weaker students would still need to prepare the
foundation of reading and maths until they reach year 5 level before
it's possible to score ok in the OC trials. Experience shows that weaker
students tend to wait until the last 6 weeks to do OC trials and many
may not finish all the trials.
One really
important area is Thinking Skills where kids are only ready to learn
when they get to year 5 level in English and maths. There is no point to
do TS early as it rests on a solid foundation at year 5 level. Around 3
months before the OC test, students start to prepare for TS. There is a
module for TS training in More ... The Thinking Skills module has video
lessons to help parents take kids through question types. The OC TS
booster tests help students improve their English foundation then move
on to do the TS reasoning questions. Strong math problem solving skills
will also be needed. GA is still important to boost TS scores
(especially with visual reasoning).
The module
Sentence Cloze trains students to deal with the new question type called
Sentence Cloze. This question type is very difficult so students will
need to practise a lot.
Students should start to focus hard on improving everything. The following modules become so important
- Personal Wordlist
-
Watch List (allowing students to add hard questions they don't
understand during the review process into the Watch List then access the
Watch List from the Welcome page. This allows parents and tutors to
quickly help them with what they cannot solve).
- Thinking Skills
- Sentence Cloze
