My Pals Are Here: Getting Value From Assessment Books

Divided into five main sections: Diversity, Cycles, Systems, Interactions and Energy, My Pals Are Here Science Booster, is a good guide book for Singapore students in primary three and four.

My Pals Are Here’s the series most Singapore primary children meet in maths and science: Marshall Cavendish’s textbooks and workbooks, used widely in schools and sold alongside a shelf of supplementary titles with names like Booster, Practice and Revision.

Which raises the question every parent in Popular eventually asks while holding three of them: does buying more of these help?

Two things to check before you spend anything.

Science doesn’t begin until Primary 3. Buying a science assessment book for a P1 or P2 child is buying practice for a subject they aren’t yet taught. Maths runs from P1.
Assessment books don’t teach. They test. They’re useful for finding and fixing gaps, and close to useless as a way of learning something for the first time. A child who doesn’t understand a topic won’t learn it from more questions on it. They’ll just get more of them wrong, more slowly.

What the different books are


Type	What it’s for
Textbook	The teaching. Follows the MOE syllabus and is what the school works through.
Workbook	The practice that accompanies the textbook, usually set as homework.
Booster / supplementary practice	Extra questions on the same syllabus, often harder. Optional, bought by parents.
Topical revision	Questions grouped by topic: helpful when you know which topic is the problem.
Past-year / exam papers	Full papers under timed conditions. Helpful close to exams, and not before.

The syllabus is the same across all of them, because MOE sets it. A supplementary book isn’t more advanced content: it’s more questions on the same content, sometimes phrased more awkwardly.

How to use one

The way these books get used in most homes is: buy it, child works through it front to back, parent checks the answers, everyone feels productive. That’s the least effective option available.

Diagnose first. Find the topics your child is weak on, from a school test, a teacher’s comment, or by working through a few mixed questions. Then use the book only on those.
Little and often beats a Sunday marathon. Twenty minutes, four times a week, retains far more than two hours once.
Mark it together, immediately. A wrong answer discovered three days later has already been half-forgotten. The value is entirely in the correction, not in the doing.
Spend the time on the wrong ones. Ask them to explain their thinking instead of telling them the right method. Where the reasoning broke is the real lesson.
Stop when it’s done. Finishing the book isn’t a goal. Nobody is checking.
One book at a time. Three half-finished books is the normal state of a Singapore bookshelf and it teaches nothing.

How science is different

Primary science rewards something different from maths, and this trips up parents who apply the same approach.

Marks are frequently lost not because a child doesn’t know the science, but because they can’t write the answer in the form the question wants. Open-ended science questions expect a stated relationship: what changed, what it caused, and why. A child who writes “because it got hotter” when the answer needs “the water gained heat and evaporated faster” loses the mark while understanding perfectly well.

That’s a skill worth practising deliberately, and it’s where assessment books earn their place: not for the content, but for rehearsing how to write an answer. Reading a model answer alongside their own, and asking what the model includes that theirs didn’t, does more than another twenty questions.

When it’s doing harm

There’s a point where supplementary work stops helping, and the signs are recognisable.

A child who’s stopped asking questions and is just filling in boxes
Tears, stomach aches before assessment book time, or a flat refusal that wasn’t there before
No free, unstructured time left in a week
Performance flat or falling despite more work, a reliable sign the problem isn’t volume
A parent buying books mainly to feel that something is being done

Let’s be straight about the last one. Assessment books are reassuring to buy. Volume is easy to measure and understanding isn’t, so a full shelf feels like progress even when nothing has changed. If a child is struggling, twenty minutes with a teacher who can see where the reasoning fails beats another book every time.

Frequently asked questions

What is My Pals Are Here?

A Marshall Cavendish primary series covering maths and science, widely used in Singapore schools, with textbooks and workbooks plus a range of optional supplementary practice titles.

When does science start in primary school?

Primary 3. Buying science assessment books for a P1 or P2 child is practice for a subject they haven’t started. Maths runs from P1.

Do assessment books improve results?

They help when used to find and fix specific weaknesses, and do very little when worked through cover to cover. They test instead of teaching, so a child who hasn’t understood a topic needs explanation first, not more questions.

How much supplementary work is reasonable?

Short and frequent beats long and occasional. Around twenty minutes a few times a week is plenty at primary level, targeted at weak topics, not everything.

Why does my child lose science marks despite knowing the answer?

Usually because of how the answer is written. Open-ended science questions expect a clear cause and effect stated in full, and a correct but vague answer scores nothing. Comparing their answer to a model one is the fastest way to fix this.

Should I buy the assessment book the school recommends?

If the school sets work from it, yes. Beyond that, buy for a diagnosed weakness, not in advance. An unopened book is a common purchase.

What to remember

Textbook and workbook are the syllabus. Everything else is optional extra questions on the same material, not more advanced content.

Buy for a specific weakness, work in short sessions, mark together immediately, and spend the time on the wrong answers, not the right ones.

For science, practise writing the answer, not just knowing it. And if the books are producing tears instead of progress, the problem isn’t that you need another one.