Passed with flying colors

After a few weeks of waiting, we finally received notice that my older daughter passed eiken pre-2. The notice also mentioned she was in the top 1% of passers. We are proud of her of course, but that is also a great confidence booster as we start to look toward eiken level 2 - going to skip pre-2 plus most likely.

Looking back and lessons learned

The most difficult part of eiken pre-2 was definitely the writing. Looking back, if we did not go through the writing practice shared on this website, I think there is very little chance she would have passed. For better or worse, the writing section of eiken pre-2 is extremely formulaic. Understanding the answer format and doing some repetitive practice was key.

Looking at her specific results, I do think we could have spent more time drilling her spelling and grammar on common persuasive writing phrases: the "therefores" and "as such" and so on.

Middle School Juken and Math

With Eiken out of the way for now, we are turning our attention back to her juken studies. This week's Big Thing was unfolded cube patterns (展開図). My older daughter has a very difficult time visualizing a cube from the unfolded diagram, and particularly how each face connects to each other when rotated around.

To help, I created a little interactive cube net builder so she can move 2D pieces around on a 展開図 and see what the resulting cube looks like. If the pieces are in a configuration that cannot be folded into a cube, the webapp shows that as well.

While not eiken related, I decided to upload the webapp to this site, both so my daughter can access it and also because I looked everywhere online for something like this and could not find it. For the same reason why this site exists in the first place, I am putting it out there especially for other parents in a similar situation.

We're all in this together.

Harry Potter

We're not going to focus too much on English studies for a while. I really do want my kids to view English as something they can enjoy, and not work. We're going to read through the second Harry Potter book this summer, hopefully.

Z.