We have not been sending Ian to enrichment classes last year, partly because of my unstable pregnancy and partly because we had wanted to settle down to a more manageable routine with a new baby. However, we felt that his progress had stagnanted after stopping his LNT classes at the end of year 2010. Hence, Hubby also agreed to send him for classes starting this year. After gathering feedbacks from friends, we had shortlisted Chinese, Phonics and Piano classes for Ian.
Chinese @ Tien Hsia
The first of the enrichment classes to commence. The trial lesson was FOC, but we had to pay for the trial if we decided to sign up. The charging part did not make sense to me, but we signed up anyway because Ian said that he wanted to go again when we asked him right after the class. The good thing was that this centre did not make us pay registration fees or deposit. The bad thing was, a few days after the trial, Ian said he did not want to go again and he preferred the art class (that he attended in December) to the Chinese class. Errr... well, since we had signed him up for a term, there was no turning back now. Hubby and I agreed to give him some time in this class and see how things turned out at the end. Our objective was to see some improvement in his poor Chinese. Somehow, we felt that he had no interest in the language as he did not like to read Chinese story books nor speak Mandarin.
Phonics @ Jan & Elly
When I learned, during the first lesson, that the curriculum for learning the sounds of the 26 alphabets would stretch for 6 months, I opted to put Ian through a placement test upon the suggestion of the teacher. Ian passed the test for half the alphabets, and the teacher gave us a few options. One was to let him enjoy the class for the entire 6 months, or to home-tutor him the other half of the alphabets, or to take an intensive course of about 4 lessons to bridge the gap. And he could either join the intermediate class immediately, or wait for the current batch of students in the beginner's class to graduate and join them later. The risk in joining immediately was that he might not be able to catch up, because from their experience, most children start to understand sound blending only around the age of 4.5 years old. Since we felt that it was quite a waste of time to spend 6 months on the letter sounds when he knew at least half of it and could already recognise all the upper and lower cases, we opted for the intensive course. And, we opted to let him join the intermediate class immediately too, since the teacher felt that we could give it a try as he might be able to cope if we did some revision at home. He has since attended one intensive lesson and one intermediate lesson. The teacher's feedback was that he coped pretty well in the intensive lesson and was ok in the intermediate. But it could be due to fatigue from the back-to-back lessons (45 minutes of intensive course, followed by an hour of intermediate lesson). Anyway, there are 3 more of such tiring weekends to go, and then things will be less hectic again when it is only a one-hour lesson.
Piano @ Mandeville
Ian has always shown an interest in music since young, and after asking around, we finally decided to enroll him in this school as they have piano lessons suitable for his age group. It will only commence in February and we hope that he will truely like the class.
English/Mandarin Speech & Drama
The speech and drama classes were conducted in his school by Julia Gabriel. I had intended to sign him up for only the English version, but put a tick by mistake for the Chinese version. Even though I had scribbled away the tick, they had counted it as an interest to enroll in the class. I only got to know about it, after he had attended the first lesson (the school did not collect any payment until I asked about it later). Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise, because Ian said that he enjoyed both classes. I had been secretly suspecting that he loved to perform, and probably this was the reason that he enjoyed the speech and drama classes now because he would have a lot of chances to perform! Hopefully, this mistake would also spur his interest in Chinese!
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