During my revision with Alycia on Science subject before her exam last week, I found out that her understanding of the concept of spring is very shallow. She seems very confused with the correlation of the diameter of the spring and its elasticity. I am ever more surprised that her Science (in Mandarin) teacher did not do any experiment with them by showing them the different types of springs. Kids are kids and seeing is believing. If you tell them something that is so technical without showing them, how then can they remember clearly? In order for something to be etched in your memory a life time, you need to see the actual object / experiment with your own eyes. Reading and memorizing alone ain’t that powerful. So at the eleventh hour before her exam, I scrambled and searched at every nook and corner of our house to find her some springs to demonstrate an experiment on spring to her. But as fate has it, in situations like this… most of the time, a spring just could not be found. I looked at my ‘blur’ Alycia and told myself that if I did not show her, she will most likely not fare well in her Science test. So I did not give up searching and then on my table top, I saw my spring hair ties! Yes I have a bunch of these spring like, wire like hair ties. I took 3 different sizes of the hair ties and showed her the elasticity of the spring hair ties with different diameters. After the brief experiment, Alycia’s understanding of the spring immediately went up. On the eve of her Science test (in Mandarin), I gave her some work books to do. I told her that Science is all about understanding the subject and of course, you need to memorize facts too. She did not fare well in her Science subject in her mid year exam in June as we did not do enough of revision and preparation. This time, she scored a 92%, which is a vast improvement from the previous Science test and I am quite happy with the marks, given that both the hubs and I read no Chinese and cannot assist her.
My hair ties and Alycia’s Science work book which I bought for her. So far, workbooks from Hup Lick Publishing are the only ones with dual language (English and Chinese) that I can find. I find these workbooks a saviour for me since I can’t read Chinese.
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