Conquering Singapore's Education System

  I try to make my notes into bullet points below. This is Primary 3 Science, covering chapter 1 to 5, living and non living things, animals, plants, fungi and bacteria and also life cycles of animals.       P3 science notes: Animal classifications: (1) Amphibians -       Thin skin to breathe (water) -       Lungs to breathe (on land) (2) Birds -       Birds can’t fly are ostrich, emu, penguin, kiwi . (3) Fish -       Fins to swim, gills to breathe. -       Fish lay eggs, but guppies, mollies, platies, sword tails give birth to their young. (4) Insects -       Six legs, a pair of feelers. Wings (butterfly). No wings (ant, silverfish, termite) -       Body divided into 3 parts (head, thorax, abdomen). Hard outer covering or exoskeleton gives shape & protect its soft body . (5) Mamma...

  There are some good modeling questions from 2018 SA1 test papers as shown below. Red Swastika School 2018 SA1 Mathematics, question 48. Question 48: Jason had three times as many red marbles as blue marbles. During a game, he lost 38 red marbles and won another 44 blue marbles. He then had the same number of red and blue marbles. How many red marbles did he have after the game? You need to know the addition of 44 and 38 actually formed the 2 units. This is a critical step.   Henry Park School 2018 SA1 Mathematics, question 43. Question 43: Felicia and Yvonne have the same number of sweets at first. After Felicia gave away 17 sweets and Yvonne gave away 35 sweets, Felicia had seven times as many as Yvonne. Find the total number of sweets they had at first.   There is no way you can immediately draw the model above at first trial. After you know Felicia had seven times as many sweets as Yvonne, you then realize you need to draw a long mo...

By far, these 2 modeling questions are the difficult one I have seen in the SA1 test papers from all the 12 good schools. These 2 questions are from Rosyth School , year 2018 SA1 Mathematics Primary 4, Section C, question 41 and question 43.   Question 41: Annie and Sarah had the same number of stickers at first. After Annie had bought 38 stickers and Sarah had lost 25 stickers, Annie had 4 times as many stickers as Sarah. How many stickers did each girl have at first?     This question tests the students if they understand after the addition of 38 stickers and subtraction of 25 stickers, these 2 figures (38 + 25) are actually 3 units because Annie had 4 times as many stickers as Sarah. Once you get this critical information right, the rest is peanut ! Good question nevertheless .     Question 43: Belinda had thrice as many sweets as Wanli at first. After Wanli had given away 8 sweets, Belinda had 5 times as many sweets as Wanl...

This homepage documents all the challenging mathematics questions from various SA1, SA2 Mathematics test papers from the top schools in Singapore after my little boy had completed them. :)   The objective is simple. I want to record down only the good questions for his future references too.    In the next few blogs, I am going to show " year 2018-Primary 3 " and " year 2018-Primary 4 " good mathematic test questions.   Do purchase the " Intensive Maths Drills " series below. They are very good books. Popular Bookstore sometimes had 20% discount   ( S$7.90 only ).     I might extend this homepage to Science, Chinese or English subjects when time goes by. This blog shall be active for another 10 more years until he reaches A-level. This is one platform to share my teaching experience with him.   Let's conquer the Singapore's education system together...