Parent / Pupil Assisted Learning

Involving parents in their children's learning at SK Jerantut Jaya, SK Teh and SJK(C) Sungai Jan

The teachers and mentor in Jerantut have been working together to create a series of fun events to bring the parents into school to take part in assisted learning activities with their children. We have worked with groups of parents of Year 1 pupils at SJK(C) Sungai Jan and SK Teh, and Year 2 pupils at SK Jerantut Jaya.

The event runs over two or three weekly sessions and it involves the parents and pupils working together to solve puzzles and play games. Each school is different, but overall the pupils are familiar with the native English-speaking mentor and his style of questions (what colour is a banana?), but their parents are generally not so familiar with either the mentor, his questions or English! This gives the pupils a chance to shine a little in front of their parents as they work on a shared English task. Later on, the mentor hands over to a local teacher who gives the parent / pupil teams a mental arithmetic quiz in BM; this time the parents have the edge.

As well as the quiz games, which are based on the popular Korean 'Golden Bell' TV quiz show for school children, the parents and pupils also team up to play some 'circle games'. The circle games are partly for fun and team building, but they also demonstrate the notion that we cannot always succeed the first time, but with encouragement we can try and try again until we do. 

The teachers and mentors have worked on a series of questions that parents can use to talk to their children about their day at school. Rather than focusing on the educational product (the children's scores and grades), the questions lead the parent and pupil toward a discussion of the educational process (the child's learning journey). A small team of teachers have also worked on BM and Chinese translations of the questions in order for more natural and spontaneous conversation to take place in the home.

A non-competitive version of the popular TV quiz game for school students ' Golden Bell'.

Participating parents, teachers and mentor.

Learning together is fun.

Lots of dads came too

The teachers and mentor prepared colourful take home question sheets for parents to stick on their
fridge doors as a reminder of some encouraging and non-threatening questions to ask their children
about their day at school.