The Joy of Learning English - Primary
Grammar
A solid foundation in Grammar is essential. Our teachers frequently teach Grammar rules with games, to be reinforced and practised by students through written exercises.
At Upper Primary levels, our lessons are more focused, zooming in on common mistakes made in areas such as Subject-verb Agreement and Sentence Synthesis & Transformation.
Reading
Recognising the importance of developing a love of reading from young, our teachers recommend age-appropriate books for our learners to borrow from our library every week. This is followed up with book projects to reinforce students’ understanding as well as to inject fun into their reading and writing.
Our teachers use a variety of authentic reading materials from sources such as current newspaper and magazine articles, story books and poems to expose our students to different text types.
A student with good reading skills will go on to do better in Comprehension and Cloze exercises.
Comprehension and Cloze Exercises
For P1s, the focus is on getting students to answer Comprehension questions in grammatical, complete sentences.
For P2s and above, students are exposed to inferential questions. To answer such higher-level thinking questions, our students are taught the questioning technique to improve their understanding of a passage. They also master our highly effective method of highlighting key words in a passage and the questions. This helps both to improve their understanding of the questions, and to minimise carelessness.
For P3s, our teachers also prepare Comprehension and Cloze passages based on current newspaper articles. Our aim is to expose our students to newspaper articles and to stretch them with more challenging tasks.
Writing
At P1 level, students learn to write in complete, grammatical sentences, leading to paragraphs. From P2 onwards, they learn the features of a good composition using the Six Traits of Good Writing. They will be guided by our model compositions, which contain the Six Traits.
Each composition done by our students is carefully marked and graded. This is followed by constructive feedback to help our students develop their strengths and improve in their areas of weaknesses.
Speaking
Our small class sizes allow ample opportunities for students to engage in stimulating group and class discussions. From P3 onwards, our students also get the chance to take turns in giving one-minute speeches. This is often the highlight of the lesson as our students can’t wait to deliver their carefully prepared speeches.
Exams
In the few lessons leading up to the exams, our teachers will reinforce exam skills, including time management and best practices in question reading and answer checking. Students practise these skills during the mock exams.
At P5s and 6s, our teachers follow MOE syllabus closely to teach the major components of the PSLE paper thoroughly. Our students improve and perfect their skills through worksheets and mini-tests.
Joy of learning English
To reinforce understanding and inject joy into the learning process, we incorporate games into our lessons. Our students often don’t want to leave their class at the end of the lesson!