January 11th, 2011
Chinese Language Exam
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The Chinese Language paper begins the 3 days semestrial exam for Zeeyau. First real school exam she is gonna take!
The pressure and stress level we felt is really minimal compared to the local stream students or peers back in Singapore. My urge to get her engine properly lubricated only started like a week ago when her classroom teacher began to distribute revision papers for them to complete and also issued a very stern reminder to parents that the children need to be able to recognise 400 and write 100 Chinese characters.
So I began testing her on the 400 words by reading the school text with her. Easy as pie, she could read everything without problem, which temporarily set me thinking that she is going to take after me…lol. However, when I tested her on individual words without the text, she could only get 2/3 of them correct. That got me a bit panicky and I decided to make word cards so I could drill her until she got all 400 words perfectly.
400 word cards is overwhelmingly too much cutting and pasting for me and I gave up after getting 2/3 of them done. Damn it, what is the fuss after all, they aren’t going to test all those 400 words and the sample revision papers given by the teacher look really easy. I also realised there wasn’t much I could revise with her except testing her writing ability of those 100 characters. So we ended up spending 2 hours learning the piano new score I printed from the net last night.
For those who are intested, below is the word list for semester 1



Back to the previous practice of sending the kid to kindergarten myself since Didi’s kinddy doesn’t have school bus service. Without the comfort of driving a car, I can only opt for the more environment friendly mode of transport and join the local by riding a bicycle.
“Love Knows No Borders” International charity sale by diplomatic organisations at Chaoyang Park and we were there to show some support since the park is just right across the road of our place.
First day of school for Didi in Beijing today! He was the first to arrive and seemed rather disappointed to see only teachers and no other children around. He looked apprehensive initially, but quickly made himself busy when the teacher gave him an activity to work on. Right, that is a Montessori based school he is attending.
Primary 1 students from the international division gathering near the school entrance.
Zee Yau and her classmates waiting patiently for the rest of the class to arrive before their classroom teacher 苏娜老师 leads them to class.

