Your child has difficulty understanding Science concepts.

In Primary 4, students are exposed to more physical Science topics while they learnt more life science topics in Primary 3. Examples of physical Science topics in Primary 4 include Matter, Light Energy and Heat Energy.

Science concepts from physical Science topics tend to be more complicated than that of life science topics. Your child may have difficulties understanding, memorising the key concepts or even applying them to different scenarios accurately. 

Your child feels that it is increasingly challenging to answer open-ended questions.

Take a look at any Primary 4 Science paper: You may notice that the paper has more long-answer questions when it was predominantly made up of short-answer questions in Primary 3. Furthermore, questions in Primary 4 are gearing towards being more application-based.

In order to tackle these questions effectively, your child needs to be proficient in applying the concepts learnt to real-life application questions, instead of simply regurgitating knowledge.

Examination setters are also looking out for more important key words and key phrases when marking papers. If your child has incomplete answers, he/she is likely to be penalised during the examinations.

Your child is struggling to master all of the Primary 3 & 4 topics for major milestone tests.

The number of examinable topics in Primary 4 has increased considerably, as compared to that in Primary 3.

As most of the time in school is often dedicated to learning Primary 4 topics, many students end up neglecting their revision for Primary 3 topics. This is especially troubling for students who are weak in Primary 3 topics as they will be tested again in Primary 4.