Welcome to another new school year!

For those parents with preschool children, you might be wondering how you can help your child build a strong foundation in Chinese and Hanyu Pinyin this year to prepare for P1 in the near future.

For those parents with Primary 1 children, whether your child has attended Chinese enrichment or not during his or her preschool years, you might be considering to sign your child up for Chinese tuition this year to help him or her cope better in primary school.

With so many Chinese tuition and enrichment centres out there, what should you look out for when choosing a Chinese enrichment programme for your child? How do you look beyond marketing brochures and websites to find out if a programme is really suitable for your child?

Here’s Part 1 of a checklist to guide your search.

What to look out for in a Chinese enrichment programme?

• For preschool kids, does it prepare your kids for Primary One? For primary school kids, does it follow the latest Ministry of Education (MOE) Chinese syllabus 《欢乐伙伴》closely?
• Does it utilise a variety of engaging and effective Chinese learning resources that are fun and appeal to students?
• Are the lessons interactive and engaging?

Aligned curriculum with a focus on oral

Did you know that that the latest 2015 MOE Chinese syllabus puts a heavy emphasis on oral communications skills. In fact, oral has a higher weightage compared to composition and it is important to prepare your kids accordingly, especially if your kids speak predominatly English at home.

Hence, at KidStartNow, our preschool programme prepares students through lively lessons incorporating dramatic role-play and oral practices, which build up your child’s confidence in conversing in Mandarin. This, combined with our reading and writing exercises, means your child is well-prepared for primary school.

At the primary level, besides being aligned to the MOE syllabus, our lessons incorporate regular oral practices to ensure that your child gets a head start in learning what is required of him or her in school.

• Effective, engaging learning resources for the ‘digital age’ child

Traditional methods of learning Chinese that involve heavy memorisation just takes the joy out of learning Chinese.

At KidStartNow, your child learns Chinese the smart way, not the hard way. There is no boring rote learning and drilling by flashcards. Instead, your child learns faster, absorbs and retains more while having fun.

This is why we have developed our signature preschool programme around our proprietary animation stories that cater specially for children of this digital age, while learning words taken from the primary school syllabus. Filled with wacky characters, the stories are humourous and exciting and naturally appeal to young children’s innate sense of adventure and curiosity. Our students have so much fun during lessons that they don’t even realise they are picking up new vocabulary, grammar and sentence construction through watching these animations.

• Engaging games that motivate

Games form an important part of our lessons too! Through playing fun games that are integrated with our animation stories or other classroom activities, your child gets to interact with the teacher and classmates in a stress-free context.

A self-motivated, self-directed learner makes the best student. Hence, our games also tap the natural sense of competition and drive to excel in children. Your child earns digital coins as rewards for various achievements, which are added ‘live’ to his or her digital bank account and shown instantly on the TV screen in the classroom. This has proven to motivate our students to pay more attention in class, volunteer to speak up in class more often, answer questions and do his or her work more conscientiously.

• Combining MOE syllabus with an interactive classroom

In KidStartNow’s Primary School programmes, we adhere to the MOE Higher Chinese syllabus, focusing on the problem spots of composition, comprehension and oral.

Having said that, we ensure classes are not boring and dry by creating an interactive class via our proprietary classroom apps. For instance, kids are divided into teams and answer questions to build a digital hamburger, making the usual boring material fun and engaging!

Experience KidStartNow’s lessons

Don’t take our word for it. Why not let your child experience a trial class at KidStartNow to see if our programme and teachers are a right fit for him or her? Make that two trial classes, as we are running a special promotion now of only $19 for two trial classes! Limited classes and seats only. Simply fill in your details below and one of our friendly staff will get in touch with you!

We’ve given you a low-down on some of the factors that you can take into consideration when you are exploring Chinese enrichment programmes for your child. Stay tuned to our next blogpost for Part 2 of our checklist of questions to bear in mind when you are visiting potential enrichment centres.