#15 – Affordable Chinese Books

Does your kid simply hates Chinese? When you ask him to read Chinese books, he will whine and complain?

What would you do? You end up in book stores searching for interesting books to engage him.

Personally, I find the range of Chinese stories books in local bookstores to be very limited. Especially for 6 – 8 year-olds, the books are either way too easy or difficult to read and enjoy. So, in my relentless pursuit to hunt down suitable books, I found 当当 (dangdang.com) one day, a Chinese e-commerce site.

I like the varieties of books the site carries. More importantly, the price of the books is very reasonable. Either because 当当 priced them affordably, or it’s due to the exchange rate, the books are way cheaper than what I can find at the bookstore.

Alternatively, I go for sprees via singaporemotherhood.com where a person would consolidate many orders for a bulk purchase. However, the down side is that it usually takes more than a month to receive my books.

But If I prefer my books sooner, then I go for 当当. Based on my experiences and what I have learn from other forum buyers, the books should arrive within 2 weeks.

#15 on my list of Top 15 Learning Resources for 2015 is 当当 (dangdang.com).

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#14 – Tutor in a Phone

We know that getting a tutor to supplement our children’s education is not a bad thing. But not every family can afford one. For this reason, this app caught my attention when I was introduced to it.

Geniebook is an app that is the result of 4 years of hard work by Beautyful Minds.

5 reasons why I like this app.

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1. There are 50,000 questions!

Geniebook claims to have 50,000 questions so that I can be sure that there are way more than enough questions for my children to practice on! And of course, worked-out solutions are provided to allow my children to understand and learn from their mistakes.

2. It confirms to the Singapore MOE syllabus.

Questions from Geniebook are carefully handpicked, frequently reviewed and continuously updated to suit the MOE syllabus.

3. It is customisable.

I like the fact that it can be customised to produce a mock paper based on particular topics that I want. When there is no luxury of time to practice for everything, I can just zoom in to my children’s weaker topics. So, if my boy is weak in the topic on Energy, I can just let him practice more on these questions. I don’t need to sieve through all the questions to find the ones I want.

4. It caters to weaknesses intelligently.

Questions are grouped according to concepts. If a mistake is made in one particular concept, subsequent questions would be geared towards correcting that concept.

5. There are Progress Reports.

I can check on my children’s progress using the Progress Reports. This allows me to clearly see their completed and weaker topics, and ultimately, how much he has improved. This is something assessment books or other educational websites cannot offer me.

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Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming response, all interested parties to get an account to use the app are now only placed on a waiting list. Why is there a finite number of users is because there are real teachers marking the open-ended questions!

If you place yourself on this list today, you would be around 650 in line. Gosh! You need patience to get an account. So, keep your fingers crossed.

For an app that mimics having a tutor (in fact, many tutors) helping my children, Geniebook ranks as my Top 14th Learning Resource of 2015.

You can read more about Geniebook here -> learn.beautyful.ly/geniebook/.

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#13 – PSLE Chinese Flash Cards

A friend lamented to me about the trouble she goes through to print out Chinese flash cards herself for her Primary 4 child next year.  She always wondered why readily-printed flash cards are only available for Primary 1 and 2 students.

There is now a solution for all mummies who love to use flash cards to revise Chinese with their children.

#13 in my Top 15 Learning Resource of 2015 comes in the form of a smartphone app known as “PSLE Chinese Flash Cards”.  I know, the name sounds cheesy but it does the job.

This app contains all 1,670 Chinese characters in the MOE Syllabus, making it perfect to complement what students are studying in the classrooms. Each flash card contains an audio recording of the pronunciation of the character and usage examples.

I also like the fact that this app is founded by a tech-savvy father, who finds it time consuming for her daughter to revise the subject.  What a supportive dad!

“PSLE Chinese Flash Cards” can be downloaded from the iTunes Apps Store for S$3.98.

There are also 2 other related apps in the series “P1 Chinese Flash Cards Free” and “PSLE Higher Chinese Flash Cards”.

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#12 – Primary School Grammer Rules

Remember your primary school grammar? I didn’t really. For instance, I had totally forgotten what a Subject Verb Agreement or Compound Subject is. They sounded like legal terms to me. 

So I decided to do a series on Must-Know Primary School Grammar Rules in August.

I dug up some old textbooks and did some revision. With the help of my husband, we also did up a few cute monsters in the form of LearnMons to illustrate some grammar rules to our P1 daughter.

We then shared the series of 14 must-know rules with our followers at LearnSuperMart. It was one of our most well-received series as we saw nearly 7,000 engagements (Likes, Comments, Shares or Clicks) from a cumulative reach of over 70,000.

If you’ve missed this series, you can find the first Rule here. From there, you can find the rest of the articles in the series.

Must-Know Primary School Grammar Rules is the 12th of the Top 15 Learning Resource in 2015 I recommend you to read and archive.

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 #11 – Better Awareness with Cubes

My P5 son has been quite good in his spatial reasoning. He can picture a shape or object in 3D easily. Aside from Minecraft (yes, the game), I attribute this to him playing a lot of puzzles, blocks and board games when he was younger.

According to the Association for Psychological Science, how often children played with certain toys ties in with their spatial reasoning skills. Children who played with puzzles, blocks, and board games often (more than 6 times per week) had higher block design scores than did children who played with them sometimes (3 to 5 times per week), or rarely.

Among the many educational block tools in the market, I personally used and like the Nikitin Material range from Lern Spiel Verlag. They are recommended for children from 4 years and above.

My son used to play with the Geocubes set, which I still have. It was responsible with helping my son to be more aware of the 3D space and recognise colour and shapes at the root of perception. It also trained him, in a smaller way, to focus on the task at hand too, although I think he has lost this already. 

If you think these are only meant for the kids, you are so wrong. Some of the tasks can be quite challenging for adults like me too! 

The #11 Top Learning Resource of 2015 is the Nikitin Material Geocubes