A Champion’s formula to success
It’s all about building three parts of the mind:
- Champion Mind
- Learning Mind
- Creative Mind
Champion Mind
By cultivating self-confidence, communication skills, interpersonal abilities, learning flexibility and a great relationship towards learning, a child is able to develop a champion’s mind to tackle all their educational obstacles. These five winning characteristics were identified by Professor Allan Snyder, Creator and Chairman of the “What makes a champion?” forum, an official Olympic cultural event.
Mr Ang emphasised the importance of teaching children to actively understand concepts, store knowledge, recall it and apply it when necessary, instead of relying on ‘drilling’ before an important exam. Encourage children to identify patterns in concepts to make learning easier, as the brain is a brilliant pattern recognition machine.
Creative Mind
Having a creative mind is not related to what you know, but instead related to your ability to process, innovate and imagine what you know. Mr Ang said that imagination was only the precursor to creativity and creativity led to the end product. He asked the audience if they thought history changing innovators like the Wright Brothers would excel in the Singapore education system today, or instead be ridiculed for their seemingly outlandish ideas. Using that example, he reminded parents to also encourage their children to be creative and think outside of the box.
Getting parents familiar with exam assessments
During her talk, Ms Lim went through what each of the papers in a English exam expects in terms of deliverables so that parents could get a clearer idea of what their children had to do. The audience was asked to try out a quick graphic stimulus based letter writing assessment, which most parents soon realised was harder than it looked.
Ms Lim also covered another component of an English exam that many children faced difficulties in: Synthesis and Transformation. These questions test a child’s ability to construct meaning and demonstrate an understanding of the grammatical structure of English. Parents also tried out a Synthesis and Transformation question to understand how children were expected to answer the question.
At the end of the talk, we caught up with Ms Lim to find out how she felt about speaking at Kidz Academy 2012. “Speaking to parents at Kidz Academy 2012 was a great way to share and introduce new ways of assisting their children’s learning, in addition to what they’re currently doing.” she said.