Renzo's afternoon routine with helper at home...

[WARNING: LOADS OF PICTURES]

A few days back, we bumped into an upstairs neighbor, whose elder son is going to primary school next year, he casually asked us about our opinions on Renzo's primary school, and then he popped an interesting question, which I've been getting often from my own friends recently too:
"So, your son is at home the entire afternoon with your helper alone? Won't he run riot with your helper?!!"

Well, the answer is, NO..

So yes starting this year, Renzo has been on this new routine where he needs to spend the entire afternoon at home with helper. We do have other options like many other families, to leave him to grandparents, or student care. But personally I feel no where beats his comfy own home. And I trust my help to do an equality good, or probably even better job than most other care givers. We prepared Renzo half a year in advance and he's fully aware that if he's not able to follow a proper routine at home, he will then need to attend student care. I've been telling him that our helper is his home teacher so, how dare is he to "run riot" with his teacher?!

Fortunately, Renzo has established a really great routine as he's been attending full day childcare since 19 months. All he needs is just a fixed timetable. And a "comm book" which is a notebook I use to communicate with him, sometimes I ask him about his day in school, sometimes I assign him tasks to do and all these are done through this "comm book". I always believe if we want to put kids on a routine, we parents need to have a proper routine too, so I always start my day with writing down a few questions, or tasks for him to work on.

And interestingly, sometimes he would correct my spelling mistakes, sometimes he would give me questions instead, and very often, I get answers which are totally unexpected, yet funny. But all these answers also help me understand him better.   At the same time, I secretly hope his writing skill will improve through such kind of writing activity. And English composition would be much easier for him to handle in the very near future.

Recently, he surprised me with answering the below random question 100% right, it's heartwarming to know he's realizing my love to him which I am trying to show through all the breakfast I make for him every morning.

My friends suggested me to chat with him over the phone but I never fancy that idea. I told Renzo that my time at work, is for my boss and my company. Everyone has our own roles and responsibilities so if there's anything urgent, his "home teacher" aka. our helper is the right person to address his concerns. Come to think about it, what if he calls me because he wants to watch TV but there's no slot allocated for TV on his timetable, and helper refused to budge, what would I do? Of course either to allow him turn on the TV or to allow that with certain condition attached to it, such as to watch TV after finishing a few pages of assessment book, otherwise, how to expect him to put down the phone? So nope, I won't allow myself to get into such kind of dilemma.

Kids being kids, he spends most of the afternoon playing, drawing his customized gundams (sometimes his favorite dragons or cars which he's not been drawing for a long time), or reading, because I do not have much work assigned to him. I still do not like the idea of assessment books as I rather they enjoy the learning process than to kill their interest for learning at very early stage with repetitive questions and exercises.

As for his school work, he's been coping well in general. Spelling and tingxie are not as difficult as what he got during K2 in childcare, so I only test him one day before the test date and as usual, I do not really give him time to prepare. If he makes any mistakes, he just correct himself from there. But no doubt, I do feel parents need to get more involved especially now he's in P1. As I always say, parents are their best teachers.

English
So far he's been doing very well although there are small mistakes here and there. He seems to love his English teacher and his English lesson the most.  His teacher also praises him often for good penmanship and nice drawing. Oh yes he's putting in a lot of efforts to draw on his English worksheet!

Recently he's tasked to prepare a script for his English pick and tell. I was very impressed and proud with the 1st draft he came up on his own. Being "very responsible" parents, we tried to help him edit his script but eventually, he decided to come up with 2nd draft on his own after he learned more from his teacher, his books and some video clips on animals. I especially love the way he shares his knowledge, informative and interesting at the same time with some trace of his humorous perosnality there.

Mathematics
This is the subject taught by his form teacher so I didn't really pay much attention, as there's no homework given up till now. I was a little surprised with some mistakes on his school worksheet, but eventually I found out that he's just having some struggles with "fact family", which honestly speaking, I see no reason why they were taught in such a complicated way, it's just simple substraction/addition which he could easily manage at the age of 4. Anyway it serves as a wake up call that nowadays kids learn their mathematics in a very different way and maybe he really needs additional assessment books at home, to reinforce what he's learned in class. After all, practice makes perfect!

Chinese 
Interestingly, Renzo seems to know that this is his weakest subject so he's been extra careful and scored full marks for most of his Chinese worksheets. So when we missed out the date of his very first weighted Chinese test (听力测验), I was pleasantly surprised that he scored full marks without any preparation. That's indeed my goal, to get him into the habit of revising daily and be prepared for test at any time.

Of course I know exactly how poor his Chinese is. Because we seldom converse in Mandarin at home, his vocabulary is extremely weak and his sentence structure isn't quite there yet. So I've been trying to dedicate 1 hour every Saturday for his home Chinese tuition. Boy that's totally not easy as we do have a younger one to manage at the same time too. This week Renzo is having his 2nd official test in school, which is his Chinese 听听说说 - situational dialogue. I am not sure how the test is structured but with some sample questions given by teacher on the left side of the picture below, I came up with sample answers for him on the right side.

It's definitely a long way to go still. And reading some other bloggers' sharing on how they manage home studying with their kids, surely make me a little nervous as some of the parents went all out with daily tuition at home. That's a challenge for full time working parents like us, so we can only entrust our son to manage his own responsibilities well in this case!