Ethan's first enrichment class

Today, we brought Ethan to do a trial lesson at Berris. We had tried putting Ethan on Growing up Gifted when he was about 8 months old but we didn't really see him through the programme and terminated after about 1 or 2 terms. As Ethan seems to be less interested in terms of academic stuff at home (except for storytelling), we were kind of concerned with his progression as Caden seemed to have advanced much more at his age by now.

So we decided on doing a Chinese enrichment programme, as we converse in english with him everyday and the level of exposure he gets at home is through the time in his nursery class and the day-to-day conversation with his grandma, which we felt may not be sufficient. Both Berris and Tian Xia were fully booked out on weekends and weekday evenings and we were quite lucky to get a slot at Berris near Hougang mall. To be honest, I was not confident that Ethan would be able to settle into the class today as he had so much problems settling at Tots House and LSK (it took him abt 2 months!).

He was fairly opened when we first brought him into the classroom, there was a little girl seated and the teacher was going through her homework with her then. Ethan was encouraged to say hello to his classmate and teacher and was asked to sit at the back of the class.

After a while, when he lost sight of us, he started crying! and the crying went louder and louder. I had to sit with him in the class when the lesson was conducted and finally he calmed down.

It was just shortly after he actually responded to teacher's questions and answered them correctly (in Chinese). I took the opportunity to leave the classroom sometime in between the toilet break by telling him that I need to go to the counter outside to pay for his lesson and did not re-enter into the classroom thereafter. I made sure that he couldn't see me as I peeked into the classroom to check if he was looking for me (or crying), and he seemed to have settled in quite well by then.

Ethan was asked to identify the new chinese word he learnt and circled them correctly. It looks pretty impressive. And after today's trial, we decided to continue with this class from next week on and hope he will no longer have any issues by then... (PaPa met his ex-colleague in the centre and this friend of his actually started his child with Berris since 3!)

And as I was checking the availability of the places in other time slots, they were mostly full. It was quite alarming to see the intense attention parents now placed on young children like Ethan on enrichment lessons (of course I do admit that I belong in this cateory!).