Alycia Is Testing My Patience

Alycia is really testing my patience to the limit.  Since early last year up until now, she has been falling sick every other month.  That’s when she first started attending pre-school.  Alycia was a very healthy baby for the first 1 year of her life and never once fell sick during that year. Her immune system started to go downhill ever since she attended pre-school in January last year, when she just turned 3 years old.

Alycia had missed more than 7 months of classes last year and had missed out on most things that her teachers had taught the pupils, which are the basics / foundation.  When she resumed classes again in September last year, she was way lacking behind her peers in class but has since improved tremendously at the beginning of this year.   She can now write her name and recognize all the letters of the alphabet.  She can also recognize numbers from 1 – 30+.  She can also recite numbers 1 – 50 (with a few numbers missing here and there)

I have had and still am having a tough time coaching her in her homework, especially in Math, Abacus calculation, mental calculation and Mandarin. To begin with, her attention span is very short.  Each time I teach her, her mind will be wandering far away.   After repeating myself infinite number of times, she still does not appear to understand what I am trying to say. However, sometimes she will give me pleasant surprises when she suddenly appears to grasp everything that I had taught her and she would give me correct answers all the way.  Many times, she will give me excuses to avoid doing her homework.

Today she brought home Math homework.  One of the exercises is recognition of numbers – circle the number(s) that is bigger than a given number and circle the number(s) that is smaller than a given number (from 1 – 50).  Another exercise is ‘what number comes before this number’ and ‘what number comes after this number’.  What I did was to write out the numbers from 1 – 50 on a piece of paper and explain the exercise to her.  After explaining to her umpteen times, I asked her if she understood the concept and she said no and shrugged her shoulders!  I got so mad with her that I was raising my voice throughout my session with her.  This happened over the past 3 days and sometimes, my mil would help me coach her.  Even my mil who is very patient with the gals lost her patience with Alycia.  I am just so worried for Alycia.  I may sound like a ‘kiasu‘ mum here but Alycia’s attitude and comprehension towards Maths and Mandarin are really making me freaking worried….. and hubby has registered her in a Chinese primary school. 

Am I putting too much pressure on Alycia?  Do you have a tough time coaching your 4.5- year old toddler in Math / Mandarin?  Do you have a fun way of teaching your toddler?  I’ll be glad to hear from experienced parents who have successfully made doing homework (especially Math) a fun thing with their kids.

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Author: Shireen

I am a WFHM of 3 lovely girls - Alycia, Sherilyn and Cassandra. I am a health, fitness and clean freak. I am a freelance content writer and occasionally help out my other half in his food catering business. I also do product reviews and accept sponsored posts on my blogs. I hope you'll enjoy reading my blog as much as I enjoy sharing my day-to-day adventures and mostly boring ranting :P Welcome to my blog! :)

17 thoughts on “Alycia Is Testing My Patience”

  1. I didn’t start coaching my 2 girls maths till they were in K1..I concentrate more on reading..through reading, they can learn maths and others too.

    Relax..its not easy to handle 3 kids esp when baby C used up so much of your energy.

  2. your educational system is too way advance for a 4 1/2 year old kid i guess. my kids were somewhat in playschool doing nothing but sing and sleep at that age. But look at them now, they are doing good. I think we shouldn’t be too hard on the kids especially that age, they are still young, let them play and enjoy learning first. of course you encourage her to study too, if you know what i mean

  3. How old is Alycia? Maybe she’s just not developlentally ready to absorp the concept of more/less, bigger/smaller. If you want, you might want to try visualisation, i.e. gathering some marbles or saga seeds or little pebbles and then putting them in lesser/more piles, going, “which pile is bigger/smaller, Alycia?” and then counting for her, how ten is bigger than five, and three is lesser than six.

    Or use songs like the Five Little Ducks (went out to play, going lesser and lesser). Or use stories with themes like the Old Woman who Swallowed a Fly (she swallows more and more animals, a silly song), learning again the concept of how when you add stuff, there is MORE stuff, and when you take away stuff, there is LESS.

    Hope this helps!

  4. Take it easy . She’s still young. Don’t push her too hard, they will eventually learn. She’s not even going to P1 yet, still got time for her to catch up

  5. Maybe you can let them join Yoga later. My niece joins Yoga Zone, as the movements are slow yet healthy and it helps her improve her concentration.

  6. It must be tough for you, handling 3 kids.

    For Maths, my boy and sometimes take out his cars and start counting them and we do addition & subtraction with it. I find that using their favourite stuffs, it often helped. For Chinese, my boy is attending enrichment class,I will go through what he has learnt and we sing rhymes and songs too.

  7. Please don’t stress the kids out with so much focus on homework! More importantly, don’t stress yourself out. Yes, kids have a short attention span..child experts have these guidelines…age 4, attention span = 4 mins, age 5, 5 mins etc. See? Use also the same guideline for “time-out” for bad behaviour. So, at age 6, I’d suggest they sit in the time-out chair for 6 mins. If we as parents try to push more, it’ll just hurt the kids in the end. Learning should be fun, esp at such a young age!

  8. Yup, take it easy and don’t stress your girl and yourself!I bought lots of workbooks/story books for my girl coz she likes to do activities in the books and read. Now, I’m afterschooling my girl and she enjoys sitting down for 1 hour plus doing my additional homework for her. Anyway, each child is different and I preferred to let her READ more coz thru reading they can really do Maths and English well. For Maths, I would draw out pictures for her to understand more and sometimes will used marbles/buttons for her to count. For Chinese, my girl likes to read in rhymes and I buy Chinese workbooks with more nursery rhymes.

  9. Shireen, i really pity alycia. she’s really too young to learn all that. i don’t remember trying to learn all those subjects when i was her age. imho, we ought to let our kids enjoy their childhood…and not be burdened by all these homework. She may not like going to school next time 🙂

  10. Same problem here…actually i found that Alycia’s homework is a bit tougher, maybe this is the standard of MY. What i have seen from Jo’s homeworks so far are more easier than Alycia one.

    Jo used to fall sick when he just started his school, but now he is ok as i feed him the spirulina and colostrum every night now. Both can strengthen kids’ immune system, maybe you can try.

  11. I think Alicia’s playschool has a higher standard compared to others. I won’t force my child to go that far, I’d rather leave it to the teachers during playschool period. I saw her reading the storybook at youtube.com. She is good. You can’t expect her to be master in everything. So pity of her..

  12. i personally think that it is not easy for mother to teach their own child, it should b easier if other ppl teach them, if u wan to send her to chinese school u have to be well prepared to coach her with ALOT of homework!! i just foundout that my nephew who is std 1 have alot of homework EVERYDAY with a VERY HEAVY BAG!!! His homework sometimes can come out to 8 subjects!!! esp if u do not know chinese, it makes it even tougher for u

  13. I personally feel that this pre-school focuses too much on academic which may not be suitable for certain group of kids. Try to find out whether Alycia enjoys what she is learning now. Listen with an open heart. If not, then maybe should consider to find another one and let her decide on this matter.

  14. I don’t have secret method, but, guess Jona just love Math in school….he would just finish Math homework without nagging from me…what the school use is: 1 + 1 = ..by drawing a circle…and for minus part, just cancel the circle if you understand what I mean…

  15. Unfortunately, since she will be going to a Chinese school for primary…it will be tough for her. I had enrolled my No.1 in a chinese pre-school…wah….the syllabus was soooo hard for me !!!! We both struggled with each other’s incompetencies!

    WAKAKAKAAKAKK…now that we’re here…I found that he learnt better in a relaxed environment. Plus, they learn things in a really fun way..more applicable to the real world. Sometimes, I wish I was in his school!!!!! 😉

  16. She’s only 4 or 5…kindy starts at 6 while Primary 1 begins at 7 years old. At this age, she’s still into fun and play.

    Many Mums above have suggested various fun ideas to help her with those tasks. You could try them out or alternatively, have your Hubby try them with her.

    I’m hopeless at Maths and I didn’t like the way my Mum coached me when I was little. She’d kept repeating the concept the same way and she got angry when I still didn’t understand. In the end, my father said maybe I REALLY didn’t understand it!

    If you get angry, she may just make up a lie to make you happy and where will you be then? A child who doesn’t understand Maths but nods just to make her Mum smile and love her again…

    We are an “English-educated” family but my nieces (9 and 6) go to a Chinese school. When they brought over their preschool etc homework over to my parents’ place, we were horrified over the levels expected!

    Due to my late father’s and my nagging, my sis did not pressure her kids. Because both of them are not graduates, they are anxious to see their kids do well in school.

    Hearing our consistent feedback, she’d emphasize to them that as long as they did their best, she’s very happy.

    Interestingly, my elder niece is doing really well in school now – she was top in class and got promoted up the form. She was among the lowest when she joined the new class and was really depressed…

    Luckily, my sis joked about being last in class (so my niece wouldn’t take it too seriously – you must know about the young kids who committed suicide over exam results?).

    Instead, the family went out for a day of fun and enjoyment. My elder niece was in better spirits and went back to her consistent studying. With her Dad’s patient and funny coaching, she’s now within the top 10 in the new class 🙂

    My younger niece is more playful, which has my sis worrying more but she seems to love English. Each time she visits my parents, she’d come over to me (the fierce English-speaking auntie her elder sis whispers, “Auntie C hui jiang hwa yue de!“) with her English worksheets.

    She also loves reading my toddler, Lucas’, English books and would read aloud to me. We’re thinking that she could be like her auntie i.e. hopeless in Math and more interested in languages.

    Sorry for the long post but I hope this helps. Every child is unique and some children may take time to transition between the fun world of preschool to serious school 🙂

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