NCEA Level 1

I am so proud of my daughter. Over the past week she has turned 15 and has managed to achieve an Excellence in her Level 1 English assessment for public speaking. It's so hard having her at boarding school sometimes to help her out but we spent about half an hour on the phone going over her speech the night before she did it. As I am an English teacher you can imagine it's pretty important to me that my daughter do her best to achieve to her potential so I am really pleased with her efforts.

We had to have a little discussion about having to go back and add to her speech. She was very reluctant about it because she had already put it on cue cards. So many of my students make the same mistake. They don't seem to realise that the kids who get Excellence instead of Merit or merely Achieved are the ones who DO go back and start again. That's exactly what makes the difference, they find out how to do it well and go back and follow the advice even though it takes so much more effort. It was an important lesson.

It is for this reason that I am bringing her home from boarding school for her study leave so that she can do some serious study under my supervision. There won't be any of her friends around to disturb her either. Poor child :-) but I plan on checking the NCEA exam timetable and sitting down with her to sort out a study program. I have already spoken to most of my teacher friends who teach the subjects she is studying to find out about tutorials they might be running which she can attend. One of them, a teacher of NCEA French, has been nice enough to offer to work with her individually, I offered her services as a babysitter in return. She's so going to hate it. But I'm sure she'll appreciate it in the long run.

Her aim is to get an Excellence endorsement on her Level 1 NCEA certificate, I'm not so sure she's capable - I know that sounds awful - but I'm going to do my darnedest to help her because I'm so proud of her for aiming high. If she aims for the star she might hit the moon and their isn't anything wrong with that!