why I made this.

I taught English in MOE schools for five years. I studied linguistics at NTU, which is the study of how language works and how children pick it up. From inside the classroom, I saw how quickly pressure can take the joy out of learning.

I also spent three years as a private General English tutor. That was where it first hit me. I was teaching my students narrative writing, and I kept getting frustrated, because they didn't read books. You can't write stories well if you've never lived inside them.

a reading culture doesn't start in tuition. it starts at home.

And I realised there was only so much I could do as a tutor, an hour a week. A reading culture doesn't start in tuition. It starts at home, with what children see their parents do.

That's when I saw what was missing. Many parents handed the whole thing over to me and stepped back, and I understood why. But my lessons couldn't replace the mother. I knew mothers had a role to play. They just hadn't been shown what it was.

A mother is her child's first teacher.

That conviction grew when I decided to homeschool my own children, starting with my firstborn at three. Some of our extended family were against it. I pushed through anyway. Since then, I've truly believed that a mother is her child's first teacher.

This year, my husband and I let her sit for the entrance test for a full-time madrasah. She'd never been to full-time kindergarten to prepare for it. She got a place, and she starts in January.

I'll be honest: I felt proud, and I was distraught. A full-time madrasah asks a lot of a young child, so being ready mattered even more for us. I loved homeschooling her. But with our fourth baby on the way, I knew I couldn't keep giving her everything at home the way I had.

Without drilling. Without pressure.

So this year, I've been doing exactly what you're doing: getting her ready for school. And I've done it the way I believe children learn best, without drilling and without pressure at home. Singapore's school system is already academically demanding, and our children feel that. Home shouldn't become a second round of it.

School teaches the language rules. Home makes the language meaningful.

That's what I do now. I show mothers how to support their child's English from home, without drilling or pressure. You don't need to turn your home into a classroom. You need to know what to do in the small moments, especially when your child gets something wrong.

I'm doing it in a language I'm not confident in, too. My Arabic is basic. So I leave her notes with the Arabic words we know, we label things around the house, and I learn alongside her.

The roadmap is what I do with my own children every day. I've made it simple enough to follow at 9pm, tired, with ten minutes to spare.

Filzah