Dialogue session on Fri, 22 Jan.

Dear Parents,

As all of you have known, our P6 dialogue session will be held tomorrow. I understand many of you may find it difficult to reach our school at 7pm due to work or personal commitments. I have decided to put up here what I am going to say tomorrow, so that if you have any questions, please feel free to email me. The highlight of tomorrow's session will be my Principal's talk as it will be matters pertaining to PSLE. The gist of my short 25-minute talk will be on the following matters:

1) I have a very strict policy of submitting work or forms on time. From time to time, I will be writing in the students' diaries should any of them constantly forgot to submit punctually. I seek your help to remind them to write in their diaries whatever they need to bring the next day, and make them read through their diary one last time before they go to bed to ensure they have packed everything in their bags.

2) I am trying to instill a sense of responsibility in our students through their corrections. Last year, I will be folding their pages whenever I find corrections undone. This resulted in pages being unfolded by them and corrections still remained undone. This time, I told them that they have to check on their past work to see if they have missed out on any corrections. If they have, they are to do them (clarify with me if they do not know how to do), and then fold the page when they submit the book to me. I will mark according to the pages they have folded.I started this late last year, and I have seen positive change of behaviour in several students.

3) Many students have tuition. However many students seem to think that tuition homework is more important than school homework. Whenever they are running short of time, they choose to finish tuition work over school work. This makes things very difficult for school teachers as we cannot access their level of understanding.

At the same time, I hope our students will have a balanced work and play time. I have seen several students already complaining to me that after school they have much more work to finish. My concern is that with too much work, they will be feeling tired even before PSLE. I hope they will be allowed time for relaxation even during weekdays as they need time to recharge for another bout of work the next day.

4) Although this is our students' final and critical year, please allow them time for participation in CCA. CCA helps them de-stress by letting them do what they like and to break the monotony of endless hours of work.

5) I have created a Facebook account with a blog site for the class. I am encouraging them to reflect on what they have learnt and to share them with the class. Their reflections will be posted on Facebook. The blog site is for them to post questions pertaining to the topics they have learnt. Their fellow classmates can help to answer them ,and for my part, I will clarify the questions in class.

6) Last but not least, I will be be posting any relevant information about our class in this website. Please check on this website from time to time. My email address is here as well and this will be the best way of communication for me.

This will be a summary of my short talk for tomorrow. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.

As mentioned just now, the highlight of tomorrow's session is the talk by my Principal. If you cannot make it by 7pm, just arrive by 7.30pm for my Principal's talk.

See you tomorrow!

Mr Andy Lam