Our Awards & News Feature

How do you engage a distracted toddler to become an effective communicator and develop a positive attitude towards learning that he can take into his academic life? This can be an uphill task when toddlers are mostly interested in play. School of Concepts (SoC) is just the place to empower your child through literacy. At SoC, young learners associate play and their surroundings to language and in turn, develop literacy and strong communication, and comprehension skills.

TALK about enrichment centres and images of children behind their desks and teachers in front of whiteboards are conjured up. However, at School of Concepts (SoC), children are encouraged to do what they know best- play.

Hence, an open space for children to have fun takes the place of monotonous tables and brightly coloured reading nooks set in the walls are used for lessons. Founder Mint Lim realised that students had a harder time coping in school without a strong foundation in English. Coupled with her own experience with dyslexia, SoC was set up last year.

Also in operations for less than a year is School of Concepts, a pre-school enrichment centre that offers children from low-income families with heavily-subsidised fees for its programmes. To determine the level of subsidies, the social enterprise relies on the Health Assist Cards issued by the Ministry of Health and partners family services centres to identify underprivileged children. Apart having a 30:70 ratio in terms of the children from varying backgrounds that it enrolls, School of Concepts also hires people with disabilities in varying roles, such as receptionists and planner for its phonics curriculum.

She was six when a Sunday school teacher at her church noticed her learning disability and helped her learn phonics. Now, the 31-year-old wants to pay it forward. The early intervention of her Sunday school teacher helped give her a leg up - Miss Lim even scored close to 270 for her Primary School Leaving Examination and managed to get into Raffles Girls School. When she was studying for her A levels, Miss Lim decided to start tutoring younger children in her neighbourhood in the Bedok Reservoir area for free - some of them even stayed with her all the way to making it to university.