Lulu Mee Lah wrote:I had a look at Avondale yesterday and had a tour with the lovely Sarah. I got goosebumps from the student to teacher ratios. How can a kid not thrive there when they will be known as individuals. The principal also seemed like a great bloke. I'm planning to look at some local schools today - Marymount and Balestier Hill. My big question will be - is Avondale $40,000 (I have two daughters to pay for) better than the local school?
What parents and students always comment on when they love a school are the teachers and the community and the caring for the individuals -not the buildings. So I don't really care if the facilties don't match other bigger schools.
Hi Lulu,
We moved here over Chinese New Year from NSW and had our daughter in Queenstown Primary for a month and although the school and staff was nice the style of teaching was not going to give our daughter the sort of education we wanted so we moved her to Avondale early this month and she's right back on track now.
There are many reasons why we decided to pull her out of Queenstown and maybe other local schools are different but suffice to say she was not really enjoying school or learning (like she did in Australia), and although the level of maths was as good as in Australia the level of english is not very good, and she found the mandarin teacher extremely intimidating. The teaching style at Queenstown very much relies on rote learning and no student ever asks the teacher a learning based question in class. Also class sizes were around 33 students per class
Putting your child into a local school requires a huge commitment of time and energy from parents/carers and given both my wife and I work full time we could not keep up with the daily homework requirements and erratic communication from the teachers. You must spend time with your child EVERY day checking her homework book and making sure she completes everything required that day. If not she will be publicly shamed in front of the class by the teacher the next day, and BTW it's up to the students to be able to copy into their homework books what the teacher wants from them, if they get it wrong or you cannot read your childs writing then bad luck. Some say this could be character building but seems more destructive of any students self-confidence to me.
Also Queenstown was a morning session school which meant our daughter had to be at school by 7:30am every day, I am not sure who this was worse for, me or my daughter
Oh, and almost all children seem to be tutored after school everyday in Primary One, and the teachers expect that.
Take a look at this local website perspective on what you need to be prepared for with local Primary One, it is very accurate from our experience:
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http://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/forum ... .php?t=117
And this is an interesting discussions from locals on the tutoring requirements:
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http://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/forum ... c.php?t=88
Hope this helps.