Tuesday, 6 May 2014

Home-Schooling : How My Dad Thought Us English.

Wednesday 7th. May, 2014    3.20am

Bismillah . Ju is still in school. She isn't sure when to leave . She has the enticing Langkawi trip to think about besides the coming annual cross-country . It's okay . Let her be, we'll sneak the syllabus into our routine bit by bit till she gets comfortable . 
In the process of conjuring a decent syllabus for our school , alhamdulillah for the availability of  scores of options . The wonderful thing about the networld , the minute you post a query .....most of your friends are ready to jump in to help.... ..haha. Thanks to the educational revolution over the past 30 years or so, we now have access to a staggering array of quality home-school websites which would have been far beyond our reach in the days of pre-internet austerity. 
Nevertheless, memories of my father's tutoring is still fresh as spring . It goes without saying , his modus operandus is going to be my guiding compass .

ENGLISH : My Dad's English lessons were indelibly associated with vocabulary-building .



Pak Atan's English Class
  1. Read a selected English reading material.
  2. Underline only 5 words new to the student.
  3. Look up the meaning in The Oxford Dictionary.
  4. Write the down the 5 words / the meaning of each / the sentences 
  5. Memorise each of the written , 5 times.( or 10? )

What Else ?
      With respect to grammar,  we were    made to learn by heart  : DAILY, irrespective of our age.
  1. Noun -  Kata Nama
  2. Pronoun -  Gantinama
  3. Verb -  Perbuatan
  4. Adverb -  Rupakata
  5. Adjective - Rupanama
  6. Preposition - Kedudukkan

More ?


For every name of town , city , river or any geographical identity that we came across in our reading for the day , we had to look it up in the atlas and sometimes on a Globe.

On that note , any topics unknown to us, that we stumbled on in the particular read, are to be researched in The Brittanica Encyclopaedia. ( regardless of what grade/age we were then in )

Simply put , it was like an all-in-one subject.

One More Thing ! 


And we have to learn a proverb or an idiom per day too!
Based on the above ...What Would My Version Be ?

No disrespect for what tremendous efforts ( time + energy, hence money) my old man has pumped into educating us himself , I find the need to modify accordingly with my ideals and my student in view.  Firstly, I do not believe in overloading a child with academics in the formal sense . I strongly would emphasize on 'loving- what- you- do ' kind of learning ....employing all your senses . I don't have a liking for the exam-flavour . I think its a joke, for the most part . So, I will not have a separate text for English and Science as an instant. In fact I will pick a Science Text Book in English , thus merging the 2 subjects into one. In a similar fashion , I will combine Malay and Geography in one book and so on and so forth with the different permutations for our subjects of choice which include mathematics, religion , cooking , hobbies and invariably business.

One might have thought that the unconventional nature of 'Our School' would be a problem, but I believe it is going to be tremendously rewarding. 



 Ps : I can't stress enough that to work this , as a newbie can be difficult ....regardless. Among the variety of recommended websites , the first was Khan Academy . I am impressed .  

 

 
                         

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