[REVIEW] Pitaya - FREE!! Primary School Top Schools Test Papers Online Platform

 Who doesnt like free stuff? Auntie here LOVES free stuff, especially when it is GOOOD too!

I can't believe this platform with such amazing features is COMPLETELY FREE! 

I'm referring to this test papers online platform called Pitaya. 

Take a look here:

It has [Paper Center], in which there are 2 modes, Mock Exam and Practice. 

[Mock Exam] will be timed and scores recorded.

For [Practice], you can choose the school/subject/paper to do.

[Test Centre] It has [Question Bank] [Wrong Question] and [Favourite]

[Question Bank] is powered by AI, which push questions for you to do.

[Wrong Question] records all the past wrong questions that you had done on the platform, for easy reviewing. I LOVE this feature the most! 

[Favourites] is like bookmark. It allows you to "star" whichever questions you encountered along the way, and they are all stored under this section.

For the questions at [Test Center], you can further filter them according to their topics. Lovely!

[Leaderboard] This is my daughter's favourite... kids are so competitive 😂

[Redeem] They even have redemption?! Hmm.. I'm not sure, a bit paiseh to redeem  when I'm not even paying anything. 😅 but my girl is so motivated to gain points and wanting to redeem something when she saves enough.

If you have signed up and find it good, you can share with your friends and earn more points!

Pitaya has all that I could ask for. Although we do spot mistakes here and there (1 million questions in the bank though, can't expect totally error-free. We just notify them to fix it whenever we encounter any. - yes you can report mistakes)

This is our referral link to Pitaya. If you find this post useful, please click on our link to sign up an account on Pitaya! 

They are currently taking order for 2023 PSLE Top Schools Prelim papers as well. Members can contact them to purchase and will be delivered to door-step by 1st week of September. 

I see that they are coming up with online classes in future too, so stay tuned!

[Review] Vitamin M Let’s Score! PSLE Chinese Video Oral Practice

 Vitamin M had recently launched their new product, Let’s Score! PSLE Chinese Video Oral Practice 一起考好！PSLE 录像口试练习 

Features included:

– 10 High Quality Video Oral Exam Questions

– Suggested Video Answers for modelling

– 10 Reading Passages with Teacher’s Reading Sample

– Interactive Vocabulary Practice Related to Oral Topics

– Downloadable Notes to Revise Answering Techniques

– Discount code to book mock oral sessions

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The 2 things I'm most worried about for J exams -- oral and compo. 😬 I have been trying my best to source for suitable resources to help her. 

Last year, I signed her up for Vitamin M's Vitamin Hour. The package came with 1 hour online lesson + 2 interactive videos (GamiStory) per week. During the lesson, teacher would guide the students on how to tackle oral questions among other things like watching videos and playing vocab games. She had so much fun attending the lessons and playing games and competing with her classmates!  I also introduced the course to my friends and all the feedback were positive!

The interactive videos (GamiStory) are of high quality and the contents and concepts are so interesting! I always watch them together with J because I enjoyed as much as she did. Side note, if you are keen on the GamiStory, they do have a package with GamiStory alone without the online lessons.

Now that I've tried out this new oral package, I can't wait to show J! As with the GamiStory, the videos in this oral package are interactive and of quality. Although the fun element is sort of reduced (because, how fun can a oral topic be? 😅 ), I can see that it is a useful tool to help the children in tackling oral questions.

There are 10 lessons in total, all the common oral topics which have high chance of coming out in exam. E.g., 公路安全， 环保，公德心   Sharing some screenshots of the first lesson here to show you how it looks like:

Every lesson begins with a passage for reading. There is a feature for you to record your own reading. Playback and listen to your own recording helps to identify problem areas.

Following that, you can play the video of teacher's reading sample. The sentence being read is highlighted accordingly.

Next will be the video of the oral topic.

Tips and answering technique is shown here, that can help you to form your own answer.

Now, this is the part I like most. For each of the questions, there will be a video that shows teacher asking student questions, and student answering the teacher. I believe this will help our children to visualize oral exam settings better, and to get used to the questions and answers. The feeling of reading model answers from text, compared to listening to the model answers coming from a child of similar age is very different.

The record feature is here as well, so that you can do a comparison and see if you missed out anything.

And of course, what is Vitamin M without some games and fun? The last section is a game that requires you to match the English definition to the correct Chinese term.

Second part of the game is slightly harder, which is to click on the words to form the Chinese term of the given English definition. Remember to scroll down further if you can't find the word you are looking for.

The lesson ends with a colourful PDF lesson notes. Although some of the pages are wordy (which is actually necessary), I think it's a great tool for parents who are helping the children to practise for their oral exams.

Price is $38, which I feel is very reasonable for such a unique package! 

And, you get to enjoy additional $5 OFF if you use this promo code SGPSCH5

Upon signing up, you get a discount code ($15 off) if you would like to sign up for their 45mins 1-to-1 mock oral session.

[Review] Superstar Teacher

There have been keen interest among parents on Superstar Teacher. I'm on my 4th year as a Superstar Teacher subscriber (subscribed P2, P3, P4, P5 for J), so I would like to share with you more about Superstar Teacher.

If you are keen to try it out, I strongly encourage you to sign up a trial account to see if you like it.  If you sign up using my referral link, and later you decide to subscribe, you will get $50. 

(Here's my short review and comparison of Superstar Teacher, Geniebook, 88Tuition and Koobits, if you haven't read about it)

Before I was a subscriber, I always see their booth at Popular bookstores, but never really check them out. I knew it was sort of a e-learning provider, but at that time, "tuition" wasn't what I was interested in yet since J was still young.

It was towards the end of Primary 1 that I got curious and signed up for a trial account to take a look. I realised the benefit of watching the videos at our own free time because it is more flexible. It also meant lesser stress for me as a parent because although J didn't attend any tuition, we signed her up for various enrichment classes and bringing her here and there and waiting for her was no joke.

And so I signed up for a P2 English and Math. She enjoyed watching the videos, so when it came to end of P2 and there was a good promo, we signed up for P3 English, Math, Science, Chinese. 

Then came P3 when I thought it would be nice to have additional help on English compo. I contacted my account manager to inquire but ended up getting Compo + P4 4 subjects as well, because there was a promotion of free Samsung Galaxy Tab at that time.

Nearing the end of P4, account manager told me they were going to revise the pricing soon. So after discussion with husband, we decided to get the P5 3 subjects package.

So this was how we kept subscribing year after year. If you are keen, do check with your account manager for the latest promotion! We are really happy to get the Samsung Tab as it is super useful for online lessons, HBL, Zoom and stuff, not just Superstar Teacher. It came at the right time.

One thing to note about subscribing is that you can't do it directly on their website. You will have to contact their customer service or account manager to confirm what you are subscribing, and they will generate a Star Code for you to enter in your Parent account, and then proceed with payment from there.

Yes, parent and child have separate account, parent account for the admin stuff like purchasing, activating, assigning tokens, while child account do the studying and redemption of toys. 

Accounts can be logged in via mobile app or desktop. Personally I prefer desktop version because there are some features that are not available in app. App can access lesson videos, more for learning while travelling, however, desktop can access Barry's Mart (toys redemption) , for example.

Here's a run-through for the child's account:

HOME - dashboard for the account.

LEARN - access lessons from here

Within the topic, we can choose to "Master" or "Practise".

"Master" is to go for video lessons

I like it that whenever they have additional info during lesson, the video will auto pause, and the right bar will pop out to give supplementary note, for example, a photo in this case, to show the child what the teacher is describing.

The right bar will also appear once in a while to ask questions in the middle of the lesson, according to what the teacher is saying, so as to prevent the child from daydreaming.

And I really really like Teacher Monica (aka Mrs Leong). She teachers English and Math. She's very clear with her explanations, and use funny examples or shares her experiences to make the lessons interesting. Amazing teacher! 💓

After learning, the child can proceed to "Practise" to answer questions.

REVISE - exercises and quizzes

ASK - If the child has questions or need homework help, and parents/siblings unable to help, he/she can use this feature to ask a teacher question. Do note that 1 question requires 1 token, tokens are given upon subscription, and can be purchased separately or redeemed from Barry's Mart if you require more.

I usually guide J on her work, but there are times when I don't know how to answer. We will then use this feature to get answers. System will assign teacher to answer the question in real time, and they are not the teacher you see in the lesson videos (just in case you are wondering).

REDEEM - most exciting place for J. There are many things here to redeem, but recently she's into lucky draw instead. 😅

That's about it.  If you are keen to try it out, I strongly encourage you to sign up a trial account to see if you like it.  If you sign up using my referral link, and later you decide to subscribe, you will get $50. 

[Review] SG Primary App

 UPDATE: It seems like they are no longer in operation. But I have found another platform that works better and faster -- Pitaya Check out my review on the platform, or head over to sign up a free account. Yes they are totally FREE!

Let's talk about SG Primary app!!

Do note that this sgprimaryschool.com is not affiliated to SG Primary.  😊

I am referring to...

It's an app that provides top primary schools exam paper questions, in a quiz format -- automarking the MCQ and fill in the blank questions. Some of the questions comes with explanations too (pretty sure they are working on that to provide more explanations and solutions).

They have 3 types of plans, Basic Plan, Plus Plan, and Pro Plan, ranging from $29.98/year to $89.98/year.

You can also play (with limitations) as Guest without having to sign up or login.

It used to be a free app, and I had been using it for 1-2 years prior. When they rolled out the paid plans, being a Kiasu mum, I signed up for the Pro Plan. And here's my review:

(Although it is an app, it actually has a web version, and I am taking the screenshots for this post using the web version. Weirdly, they don't link to their web version on their homepage, but here it is, the link to the web version: https://sgprimary.org/convert-account)

What I like about the app

It's an app! I travel with J on public transport quite a bit (to go to enrichment classes), when she request for some screen time, I will ask her to do some questions on SG Primary. If I bring extra phone with me, we will do the questions separately and challenge our scores.

All the questions done and the results are tracked, so you can revisit them again, especially the wrong ones.

It also provides performance tracking reports

Honestly, I have never really looked at the reports. Because all I wanted is for J to do the questions. Depending on your needs, it may or may not be a useful feature. But I like it because it's a visual representation of what has been done. 

What I don't like about the app

It crashes pretty often. It gets very frustrating when you are half way through the questions and then it crashes. The app just closes by itself and you lost whatever you were doing. So I will not encourage you to set your number of questions more than 10 per session. In fact, 5 questions will be a safer bet.

Another thing that I hope they can improve on is the errors. I don't fault them because it is really a lot of questions and options to work on. 

Minor typos are ok as we can figure it out. But there was one questions that made us scratch our heads recently. 

It says correct answer is "hammers". J asked me why and I couldn't answer her because I don't know what "hammers more energy from the sun" means.

My English is not exactly good, so I thought it was my problem. I googled for the definition of "hammer" and still didn't understand why "hammers" would be an answer for this question.

Finally, I went to download the actual past year paper, and realised that the word was not "hammers" but "harness". 😂 I have reported the error a week ago but it's still not updated. We shall see.

Apart from that, I think it's a pretty helpful app, especially for people like us who are on the go. It saves the hassle of marking the physical paper. 

[Review] Koobits Science Review and Walkthrough (Part 2)

Before you proceed, check out the Part 1 of the walkthrough if you havent!

 KooClass

KooClass consists of 21 topics, but you will see 42 "topics" here because there are 2 types of classes, 1 is Misconception, and the other is Keywords.

When you clicked into a Class, there will be a few Lessons under the class. The first is free to join, and the subsequent one requires 20 KoKo Credits.

Within a lesson, there are 5 segments. 

1) Fun with Science is an animated lesson explaining the concept.

2) Do and Learn will be a 4 questions quiz that will earn you scrolls upon completion.

3) Watch and Learn are videos on questions that teaches you how to answer.

4) Do and Learn, once again, another Do and Learn that serves as a checkpoint to see if you remember what you just learned.

5) Self Check is just a question to check if you have learned.

KooFun

KooFun has 3 sections, My KoKo Monster, BrainGames, and StoryScience. This section is not academic.

The first one is My KoKo Monster, which is just a customizable monster according to your preference. 

2nd section is BrainGame. What I like about it is that the games are only accessible during 8am to 6 or 8pm, and there is a limit of 25 minutes per day for games. The games are also required to be unlocked, using the KoKo Credits earned.

There are 3-4 games under each broad topic - Energy, System, Life Science, Problem-solving, Interaction.

Third section is the StoryScience. You have to unlock the story books with KoKo Credits. 

Friends

This is shared between Koobits Math and Koobits Science. Each account has a friend code that they can give to their friend to add the friend into the list. 

Report

You can access both Koobits Math and Koobits Science from here, if you have access for both. The reports show you your progress.

Leaderboard

Leaderboards are what J loves checking out. It introduces some competition to the children and make them push themselves a little more. You can also access both Math and Science Leaderboards from here. There are more challenges at Koobits Math, so there are more types of leaderboards. 

For Science, there are currently only 2 types of leaderboards -- Hero of The Day and Top Brain

I think I have covered most, if not all, of the features available currently. 

Actually, a while back I was thinking of not renew-ing, because J hardly access it. 

However, as I was playing around with it, I really see the value Koobits Science can provide. What I especially like is the OEQs under KooTraining.  I like it that it has fill in the blanks for online OEQ, and that I can print the worksheets for offline practice. 

As I mentioned in Part 1, I think it's a good idea to first do the online practice to fill in the blank. At the same time, I think I will let J read and familiarise with the OEQ answer. And then make her do the offline practice, to write out the entire answer.

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Ok that's all for now. 

If you are keen, go check them out! https://www.koobits.com/sg/science Sign up for their free trial to get a feel of it. 

And if you are thinking of getting both Math and Science, they do have bundle discount too! 

Hope this helps!