Heguru Assessment

After attending Heguru for three months, Valerie was scheduled for an assessment last week. It was not an academic assessment as I was expecting. It was more like a one-to-one session with the sensei. Sensei commented on her change of behaviour in class. How she's paying attention more and have stopped running around. Yeah, I agreed she has improved a lot. Ivan and myself kept talking to her and telling her to sit down in class and don't run around. We also told her not to touch the abacus. And last week, she walked towards the abacus, but later she turned and looked at me. I signalled her to come back and she did! So although her classmates were happily playing the abacus, she actually listened and sat down.

There are a few new things that sensei recommend we could practice with her at home.
1. Mandara - although Valerie is still small, we could get her to colour the Mandara worksheet in full colour. And then show it to her throughout the week before the next class. So in a way to train her to remember the diagram. Then we could draw it back in class.

2. Peg Memory - Heguru usually provides the peg memory sheet whenever we start a new set. We're asked to sing the peg memory song to Valerie at home to help her to remember. This just gave me an idea. I'm going to scan and print another set, laminate and cut it out. And let Valerie match the picture to the number (since she loves doing that in class anyway).

3. Linked Memory - We could get the LM set and create stories to link 10 picture cards. Then cover them with numbered blank cards. Then flip the blank card to show the picture card underneath as we repeat the story (this is practiced in Heguru). I'm starting out with 6 cards for now and repeat the same 6 cards (instead of creating different set every time) and will slowly add 1 more card. I'm merging both Heguru and Shichida method here, not sure if this is right :P 

But one thing I learned from another mommy's blog is, the correct way to do LM is by creating a line that links object A to object B and then another line to link object B to object C. Instead of one sentence that links object A to B and C. And I find this to be true. I can remember better using the earlier method. After doing this twice this week, I noticed Valerie really sat down to look at the 6 cards I showed.

4. Homework - I've never started on homework simply because I thought it's silly to get a toddler to do homework when she doesn't know what's going on. But we're told that kids will learn very fast on the concept of homework and passing up of homework. That the older kids in the other class look forward to doing homework every week and even cried if they forgot to bring it back to class. So I've started this on Valerie this week. Let's see how it goes.