WELCOME TO PARENT’S HUB
Choosing the right pre-school for your child is a crucial decision that sets the foundation for their future learning, development and success. It is worth investing time before making your selection.
The Value of a Cambridge Education
Through this 20-minute video, we aim to provide a selection framework to help you navigate this important choice.
Beyond ABCs: Open Future Doors
If you are keen to learn more about the Cambridge education, you may be interested to read this book, “Beyond ABCs: Open Future Doors”, written by Dr Richard Yen, Founder of Ednovation, our parent company. Dr Yen shares how his personal experiences have influenced the development of our unique Cambridge curriculum and simplified the science, research and pedagogy behind it.
Click on the book to view.
It’s just a quick 40MB download – you’ll have it in under a minute!
Chapter Highlights:
Key Takeaways
Chapter 1: Dream Outcome for Your Child
- It’s important to choose the right pre-school as it can significantly impact your child’s future development and success.
- Besides learning the basic ABCs, your child must be equipped with a broad set of skills to effectively navigate an ever-changing world.
- Our dream outcome at Cambridge is to ensure that your child is prepared to not only handle future academic challenges, but also successfully navigate societal interactions and be adaptable to future challenges. We want to foster a holistic skill set that includes self, academics, people, and future skills.
Chapter 2: Self-help Skills
- It’s important to emphasise the need for children to learn practical life skills to navigate adulthood successfully.
- There are long-term impacts of over-pampering children; instead, it’s important to foster independence.
- Cambridge’s curriculum prioritises autonomy, manners, and environmental responsibility from a young age.
Chapter 3: Academic Skills
- Early childhood is a critical period for learning, especially for languages like Chinese, due to the brain’s “use it or lose it” nature and synaptic pruning process.
- Using AI-driven educational tools like AI Chinese and AI Maths during pre-school years can deliver personalised learning experiences and provide clear insights into your child’s progress.
- Introducing your child to advanced topics such as iSTEAM topics at a young age can set a foundation for future academic opportunities, potentially leading to direct admissions to secondary schools without worrying about the PSLE.
Chapter 4: People Skills
- In the age of AI, it’s more important than ever to help your child develop people skills. Cambridge helps to foster skills such as emotional intelligence, strong character, and creativity from an early age; these uniquely human attributes are less likely to be replicated by machines.
- Cultivating self-control is essential for a child’s long-term well-being and success. We live in a world of instant gratification, making it even more important to help your child develop self-control at an early age. This effort is supported by Cambridge’s Executive Function (EF) assessments, which deliver effective learning and intervention strategies.
- Early childhood is the optimal time for exploration and enrichment, allowing your child to uncover his or her passions and talents before the onset of academic pressures.
Chapter 5: Future Skills
- Technology literacy is a critical skill for future success. Early exposure can set the foundation for tech fluency, as demonstrated by the early experiences of tech luminaries like Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
- The Cambridge iSTEAM curriculum is designed to demystify complex concepts in innovation, science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics, making them accessible and engaging for pre-schoolers, fostering a natural intuition for these subjects from an early age.
- Encouraging entrepreneurship is integral to the Cambridge approach. We develop these skills through proven methodologies like Design Thinking from Stanford University, used by many of the world’s leading tech entrepreneurs.
Chapter 6: Open Future Doors
- At Cambridge, our pre-school education is not just a curriculum; it’s a dream outcome we aspire to achieve for every child.
- Though the future is unpredictable, our comprehensive approach focuses on academic proficiency, interpersonal skills, and forward-thinking capabilities. It is designed to equip your child for success in any scenario.
- Realising this vision requires a collaborative effort; we partner with parents who share our commitment to unlocking a world of academic and professional opportunities for their children.
Why I wrote this book
All parents want their children to be successful. I am no exception. I have a pair of twins: a boy and a girl. Because of my unique background in high-tech and pre-school education, I believe I have some valuable lessons to share. I hope you will find them useful.
By way of introduction, I am a Harvard-trained Ph.D. physicist. Besides conducting research and development, I have worked in Silicon Valley, both in the computer industry and as a venture capitalist. As an entrepreneur, I founded Ednovation, which develops edtech and operates 73 pre-schools in Singapore, China, and ASEAN. I have dedicated the past 30 years of my life to early childhood education. (Cambridge is a pre-school brand under Ednovation.)
My experiences have shaped my beliefs in how pre-school education should be carried out to prepare our children for the future. In fact, my own children were a catalyst for the development of Cambridge. As my twins reached pre-school age, I thought about how I would like to see them educated, and this shaped the development of our preschools. My own children then attended and graduated from one of our pre-schools.
I hope that by sharing these stories, you may clarify your pre-school selection criteria for your child.
All credible pre-schools should prepare children well for the ABCs of early childhood education.
Although many great early childhood education approaches have evolved over the years, our world is dramatically changing. More importantly, advances in neuroscience, educational pedagogy, and technology have progressed significantly. We are now entering an era where mRNA is engineered to fight diseases in our bodies (i.e. mRNA COVID vaccines), and AI is challenging our intelligence.
At Cambridge, we believe that in this rapidly changing world, the basic ABCs are insufficient to prepare children for the future. As we shall see later in this book, our children’s brains have sensitivity periods in which we must instill other skills beyond the traditional ABCs during the pre-school years to prepare them for the future.
Drop us an email if you would like to collect a complimentary physical copy of the book at our pre-school or receive a Kindle version (both English and Chinese edition available).