New Accelerated Diploma in ECE from MCYS..

This is the new Accelerated Diploma on ECE by MCYS, involving the shorter period of 700hrs of training, rather than the new 1200hrs.

This must be the best time for people to get into ECE ..with so much money being put in by the 'garmen'. Even those who might just want to try out ECE, and getting paid too! Know anyone? Pass this info along..the ECE field needs more committed professionals like us..

Contacts for more details are below: (btw, Poly Diploma or Degree is reqd for entry)

24 Mar 09
To : Child Care Centre Operator/ Supervisor

WSQ Professional Diploma in Early Childhood Care and Education - Accelerated(PDECCE-Accelerated)

The Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) would like to thank all who had attended the briefing session held on 2 Mar 09 at the NTUC Auditorium Centre on the MCYS' Accelerated Conversion TrainingProgramme. Since the briefing, we have received many requests for furtherdetails on the accelerated programme.

2 MCYS has appointed RTRC Asia as the programme manager to conduct thePDECCE-Accelerated and to administer the disbursements from WDA. The first intake has been scheduled for May 2009 with an intake of 40. Trainee teachers would need to be employed by a child care centre prior to class commencement and will undergo 3 days of classroom learning (9 am to 5 pm)and 2 days of practicum at the child care centres per week. The course duration is approximately 12 months.

3 PDECCE-Accelerated comes under the auspices of the WDA's SkillsProgramme for Upgrading and Resilience or SPUR for short. As such, employers only have to pay $700 after 90% of funding from WDA. Participating childcare centres will receive a monthly stipend of 80% of the trainee teacher'sbasic salary, subject to a cap of $1,000. As the employer, the child care centre will be required to top up the balance of the trainee's salary.

4 A set of Frequently Asked Questions is attached for your reference. We will be uploading these onto our Child Care Link. For more information or clarification on the PDECCE-Accelerated course, please contact the representatives from RTRC, Asia, Ms Lydia Cheong at 6332-0685 or email atcheongmc@rtrc-asia.com or Ms Pauline Quek at 6332-0687 or email atquekmh@rtrc-asia.com.

Degree Courses supported (and paid) by MCYS

Info about the Degree courses in ECE supported (and paid for) by MCYS, with contacts for further enquiries, below :

13 Feb 2009
To: Child Care Operators/ Supervisors

MCYS SCHOLARSHIP (DEGREE) for Child Care/ Pre-school Teachers - 2009

The Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) has always placed considerable emphasis on the quality of early years education. Over the years, the child care sector has seen a progressive movement in the overall quality of early years education in Singapore. MCYS, together with the Ministry of Education (MOE), have put in place the following supporting measures, such as bursaries for diploma courses, curriculum resources, grants to fund innovation and the purchase of teaching and learning resources

2 In 2009, MCYS will continue its efforts towards professionalising the child care sector by offering Scholarships for child care teachers to attain higher qualifications. We are now pleased to invite child care centres to nominate teacher(s) for the Scholarships, which are offered for the following degree programmes/ intakes:-

Training Institution Programme Intake
National Institute of Education (NIE)Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood Education)July 2009
Regional Training and Resources Centre, Asia (RTRC Asia)Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood Education)April 2009August 2009Bachelor of Science in Early Childhood EducationOctober 2009

3 For course details, please visit their respective websites www.nie.edu.sg or www.rtrc-asia.com

4 We have enclosed an information sheet on the B Ed (Early Childhood Education) by NIE, application form, general terms and conditions and FAQs on the Scholarship for your reference and nomination. Your completed nomination form, with relevant supporting documents, should reach us by 6 March 2009.

5 For further clarifications, please contact the following officers:-
Ms Joanne Quek Tel: 6354 8616 Email: quek_yueng_san@mcys.gov.sgMs Eleanor Lim Tel: 6354 8929 Email: eleanor_lim@mcys.gov.sg

JK Rowling's Commencement Speech in Harvard

A truly inspiring commencement speech by the Queen of Fantasy, JK Rowling at the Harvard University last year that we should all listen to (or read, not just once but whenever) to rebuild the strengths in ourselves.

With daily news pointing to more and more people around us facing tough times, her words bring us a lot of poignant messages but the most important, in my view, is ..that failure can be an excellent 'teacher'.

So, sit down and relax with a cuppa. You can see or 'read' her..

Part #1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pucdJHjZaqs

Part #2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIbTqNrxSV0&feature=related

"President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much."

My ECE Assignments : Tracking my ECE Course Grades..

In class this week, I was asked by a lecturer to share my grade for one of the ECE course modules. Well, I couldn't remember it. But since it is of interest, and can provide a small guidepost for the kinds of grades one can obtain for similar assignment submissions (see "My ECE Assignments" series in earlier postings), here's the half-time scores:

ECE Course: Specialist Diploma in Preschool Education (SDPE)

Results : DPT modules

1. Philosophy of ECE, History and Tenets : B

2. Human Growth and Development : B+
3. Working with Parents and Community Agencies : A
4. Special Needs : B+
5. Professional Development in EC Setting : B
6. Observations, Planning, Implementation, Assessment : A
7. Practicum #1 : B+
8. Understanding and Presenting the Physical Environment : C+
9. Safety, Health and Nutrition : A
10. Positive Guidance Practices and Classroom Mgmt : A

Results : DPL Modules
1. Introduction to Teacher as Researcher : A+
2. Action Research : A+
3. Preschool Admin and Management : A

(ps..no self-promotion here, just sharing. Hopefully, like me, you have dodged a couple of bullets along this ECE road you have taken, as this "Matrix" photo depicts..)

Note: Refer to next posting below in Mar 2010 to see the rest of my grades:

http://childrenareourfutureteachthemwell.blogspot.com/2010/03/my-ece-assignments-tracking-my-ece.html

"The Mom Song" that all of us can relate to..

Here's a song that all of us, early childhood educators and moms alike, can relate to..

"The Mom Song":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nem0bkErGVY

(thanks to Jane Seet, DPT Class 2008/9 for bringing this to us)

My ECE Assignments : Music for Young Children

"My ECE Assignment" series is meant to demystify ECE and make it a more pleasurable endeavour for those of us who are willing to commit to it :

Individual Assignment : Reflective Papers and Integrated Music Lesson Plan

Reflective Paper (Part II a)
What is your philosophy as a preschool teacher? How does your philosophy influence the way you teach music and movement to young children?

My philosophy as a preschool teacher is that I see myself as a “mind-expander” for the children. This means that I have the capacity to help the children see and experience all the beauty and the wonder that the world can bring to them, through their minds.

Children are curious and inquisitive by nature. By fanning this natural curiosity of theirs, I can be their vehicle to grow their four key developmental domains of the physical, the intellectual, the emotional and their social domain.

I therefore see music and movement as a very important method for me to reach out to the children. Teaching them music, especially for the musically-inclined, provides a new pathway for every teacher to gain access to the mind of that child. They can also be taught linguistic and numerical skills through music and movement, whenever lesson plans are integrated to include language and mathematical concepts.

Music and movement is therefore a crucial teaching tool for a preschool teacher like me to reach out to the children who are musically-inclined, or otherwise. I can enhance my lesson plans by integrating music and movement into other domains like language, thus increasing the effectiveness of my lessons to the children.


Reflective Paper (Part II b)
Discuss the challenges that preschool teachers will face integrating music and movement across the curriculum. Provide recommendations on how these challenges can be overcome.

The challenges that preschool teachers will face integrating music and movement across the curriculum are many fold. I would list the following challenges as the key ones, and offer the following recommendations to overcome each of them:

1. The preschool teacher is shy to perform music and movement with the children, for fear of being ridiculed by the children or their fellow colleagues.

I believe that this is the Number 1 inhibitor to teachers using more music and movement in their daily lessons. I am keenly aware of this because I felt the shyness within me during my own lessons in class, when they were conducted by my lecturer. This fear of being ridiculed in front of children (or even adults) cannot be over-emphasized in its importance in deterring preschool teachers from using more music and movement in their lessons.

But I now learnt that the best way to overcome this shyness is to literally and as stated in the ever-present advertisement of Nike, “Just Do It”. Some preparation before the lesson on music will also help greatly. If there are fellow teachers who can join you in performing your dance and movements, and critiquing them as well, then, all the better.

2. The preschool teacher is untrained in music and feels inadequate to teach music to the children.

Feeling inadequate because one is not trained in a specific knowledge area is very natural, when one is asked to share that knowledge. It therefore stands to reason that some formal training in music and movement will help significantly in improving the confidence of a preschool teacher in delivering it to the children. In fact, some basic understanding on music will go a long way towards upping that confidence in every preschool teacher.

3. The preschool teacher is not supported with the right musical equipment by their centre.

This is a perennial problem. But it is a real issue, nonetheless. Preschools have to be prudent in their spending and musical equipments are by no means inexpensive. However, if the benefits of teaching music and movement are well understood by the management of the preschool, funding will be readily made available, especially if they understand that learning music is also learning other domains like numeracy and language at the same time.

4. The preschool teacher does not have the time to find (and learn) the songs that would interest the children, due to her workload in class.

The old adage that “Time is what you make of it”, rings true in this case. Preschool teachers have to embrace music and movement as an effective tool in growing a child. Once this is fully understood and internalized within the psyche of the teacher, I am sure that the time spent on finding new songs to reach out to the children of her class, will manifest itself.

5. Unfamiliarity with the songs will also hamper the preschool teacher from using them for her children.

This challenge is true with almost all new endeavours in life. But the unfamiliarity can be overcome if there is a will to learn new things, on the part of the preschool teacher. Who would have thought that I would be performing hip-hop at this stage in my life in front of other adults, as unfamiliar with hip-hop as I was, at the beginning of my own lessons last month? This is an excellent example of having the will and determination to learn something new, and in doing so, things become familiar.


6. The preschool teacher is fearful of singing out of tune in front of her children.

Singing comes naturally to children of preschool age. They appear to not worry about whether they sang in tune or off key. Such an attitude by children should also be adopted by preschool teachers. Children appreciate the enthusiasm shown by teachers when the latter are singing, more so than care for the tune itself. This in itself, is a lesson for all preschool teachers.

7. The preschool teacher thinks the parents of the children prefer to have more of their children’s time spent doing worksheets, rather than in listening to or singing songs.

Within the context of Singapore, this perception may well be true. But I believe that it is borne out of ignorance on the part of the parents. So if teachers can reach out to parents by showing them how their children have learnt numeracy, for example, better when combined with music and movement, I am of the opinion that the parents’ views will change, for the better. This challenge is indeed a real opportunity for teachers to increase their own interaction with parents themselves, which therefore becomes a side benefit for the teacher.

8. The curriculum of the preschool itself may have a much stronger emphasis of all areas of teaching other than music and movement, therefore giving the teacher the impression that music and movement is of lesser importance to the management of the centre.

This situation may well be true in some preschools. However, in almost all forward-looking preschools, the emphasis on music and movement is always discernible, and they are proud to say so to the parents of the children in the class. The management of the preschools who are not inclined towards music and movement can therefore be swayed to make changes, if teachers in those schools continue to influence the thinking of management by showing them positive results. Slowly but surely, the views of management will change, for the better.

9. The preschool teacher does not fully understand the enormous developmental benefits that a child can get by being exposed to songs and movements in class.

This challenge can be easily overcome if preschool teachers are willing to entertain new ideas and keep their minds open. Attending music lessons that are targeted at children of preschool age may be a worthwhile venture for some of these doubtful preschool teachers.

10. The preschool teacher feels that music and movement should be delivered to the children through enrichment programs offered by other service-providers external to the centre services.

If this situation is present within a preschool, I feel that it is incumbent upon the management of that preschool to help their teachers understand the real benefit of providing these music and movement lessons in-house, as opposed to farming it out to other service-providers. This is a straightforward matter of educating the teachers themselves, and the management should take the initiative to do so.



Integrated Music Lesson Plan (Part 11 c)

(A) Theme : Animals and the Railway
(B) Subject Areas : 1. Music and Movement 2. Art and Craft
(C) Age Group : N2 – K1 (4 - 5 years old)
(D) Number of Children : 12
(E) Duration : 40 minutes
(F) Prior Knowledge : Children know various animals and the MRT.

(G) Objectives :
1. To move rhythmically to the song and to the words of the rhyme, “Piggy on the Railway” ( to the tune of “Eensy Weensy Spider”).
2. To draw and paint the images of the rhyme/story.

(H) Materials :

(i) Words of the rhyme
(ii) Art paper
(iii) Water colour palettes
(iv) Brushes
(v) Aprons


(I) Procedure:
(i) Tune-in Activity:
1. Teacher will invite the children to sit in a semi-circle.
2. Teacher to ask the children to describe their favourite animal:
- what is it?
- why do they like it?
- what colour is this favourite animal?
3. Teacher will write on the whiteboard the animals and the colours of the animals, as said by the children.

(ii) Main Activity (include 3 questions you would ask children):
1. Teacher will begin by saying out loud the rhyme and to ask the children to listen carefully.
2. Teacher to ask the children to follow the movements of the teacher, as the teacher sings the song for the 2nd time.
3. Teacher will ask the children, “Would you all like to do this song again?”. The teacher to then repeat step (2).
4. Children to now do the rhyme and movements by themselves.
5. Teacher to then form 2 groups of 6 children, with one group performing the rhyme and movements, as the other group watches. This will be repeated by switching the role for each group.
6. Teacher to ask the children : “Are you enjoying yourselves, children?”
7. With an emphatic “yes” from the children, the teacher will then ask the children to do the rhyme and movements, one last time. Children to sit down after this, and have a drink from their water-bottles.
8. Teacher to distribute the art paper to each child, with their water colour palettes and brushes.
9. Teacher to ask the children : “Do you remember the rhyme and the story in it?”
10. Teacher to then ask the children to draw and paint whatever images they can think of that they like about the rhyme, or whatever pictures that come to their mind when they think of the rhyme.
11. Teacher to allocate 30minutes for this painting activity.
12. Teacher to announce that there are 5 minutes left before asking the children to finish their work samples.

(iii) Closure:
1. Teacher to ask the children which part of the singing of the rhyme thay enjoyed the most and why.
2. The children will each be asked by the teacher to describe what they have painted, while the rest of the class listens.

(I) Followup:
To extend this Lesson Plan into the Language domain, the teacher will ask the children in the class to remember, speak and then write the 4 key words of the rhyme :
1. Stones
2. Bones
3. Fair
4. Care
This will be done with the guidance of the teacher.


Appendix
(A) Words of the Rhyme (sung to the tune of “Eensy Weensy Spider”):

Piggy on the railway
Picking up stones
Down came an engine driver
Broke his bones
“Aah”, said the Piggy,
“That’s not fair”
“Oh”, said the engine driver
“I don’t care”

Ensuring Quality of Preschool Education : MCYS

Multi-pronged approach ensures quality of preschool education
ST Forum 25 Feb 09

I REFER to the letter last Thursday, 'Beef up monitoring of childcare centres' by Mr Kuan Weng Chi. Mr Kuan feels more should be done to ensure the delivery of quality preschool education.

We agree that the provision of quality preschool programmes is important. Instead of prescribing specific curriculum, we seek to provide, through our licensing requirements and the Ministry of Education (MOE)'s 'Nurturing Early Learners' framework, directions on the desired outcomes of preschool education, and how these can be translated into quality learning activities. This allows for diversity in the teaching methods and development approaches to cater to the needs of different children. Parents can then select a service that best meets their preferences and expectations.

Minimum standards are ensured through our licensing system, which covers all aspects of childcare provisions, such as the physical environment, safety, health, hygiene, nutrition, staffing and programmes. The Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) requires each childcare centre to develop its own philosophy of care for children, and a set of developmentally-appropriate practices in the areas of pedagogy and curriculum. Centres are also required to employ qualified teachers to implement the programmes. Recently, we had further raised the minimum requirements for preschool teachers.

MCYS also conducts unannounced visits regularly to centres to ensure compliance with licensing requirements and that quality and care standards are maintained.

Our multi-pronged approach aims to bring about better quality of preschool education. But there is always scope for improvement, and we review our approaches on a regular basis. In doing so, we will take Mr Kuan's feedback into consideration.

Lee Kim Hua
Director
Family Services Division
Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports



Childcare centres monitored for quality
ST Forum : 26 Feb 09

I REFER to last Thursday's letter, 'Beef up monitoring of childcare centres'. Every childcare centre is licensed by the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports. The licensing framework is well-established and sound. Areas of assessment include physical environment, safety, health, hygiene, staff training and qualifications, programme and curriculum.

These dimensions are consistently and closely monitored and the licensing process is a rigorous one. Centres are awarded six-, 12- or 24-month licences in accordance with the ministry's well-rounded assessment of the centre's performance. Newly set-up centres are awarded a 12-month licence.

The assessment criteria have, over the years, gone through reviews, and as childcare operators will attest, been instrumental in driving overall improvements in the operations of childcare centres. Last month, the ministry further revamped licensing standards.

To encourage individuality, flexibility is accorded to each centre to run its programme, and to position its service in line with its philosophy of early childhood education while being guided by the ministry's licensing standards, and the Ministry of Education's framework for kindergarten curriculum.

From the business standpoint, this also allows product differentiation. The varied models and differing focuses offer families more choices for the care and education of their young ones. This gives operators motivation for self-improvement and provides avenues for research and development. Opportunities for learning from one another, for the betterment of the field, abound.

Families have different needs and preferences. Parents should capitalise on the multitude of programmes available, to select one that best caters to their needs and their educational and developmental goals for their children. It is important that, in making this choice, parents consider a centre with a philosophy of care that parallels their personal values and ideals, as differing views may result in disagreements over dissimilar expectations.

Ultimately, proper delivery of the programme depends on the quality of the preschool teachers, who are in direct contact with the children and their families. As an organisation, we are strong proponents of both ministries' initiatives in raising the standards of preschool teachers, and we work hand in hand with them towards achieving the same goal.

Chairman,
Association of Private Childcare Organisations (APCO)