Popular student card

Being kind of a kiasu mom, what do I do when my princess came back with less-than-satisfactory results? By "less-than-satisfactory", I meant she could've done better without careless mistakes. She did exercises at home, she did 2 sets of past year questions - one for her school and one for another school (the one for another school purchase wrong, oh well). For important subjects like Maths, Mandarin, BM, the exercises she did are from the leftover workbooks from her daycare and hand-me-downs from ex-colleague. It was like one or two workbooks for each subject. Still she did some mistakes in exam paper that she did not do during the exercises done just a few days before exam. She also copied wrong words which caused her to lose marks for BM Penulisan and Mandarin Penulisan. She forgot to put units for her Maths (but she didn't make this mistake during exercise) and she lost marks for this subject too. OK OK, so we do not know all the exam results yet. Still it made me rethink my strategy for coaching our princess. She knew she did not meet my expectation and she felt really bad about it.

In order to sharpen her mind during the holidays and prepare her for the new school year, I've decided to go the way of the "tuition teacher method". After some discussion with a friend and looking at how daycare centers coach children, I realize most of them are using workbooks. And I believe they use lots of it. So in my moderated version, I started with one or two workbooks for the holidays. I'm revising the standard 1 syllabus with her, as only one or two publishers have come up with workbooks for the new syllabus KSSR for standard 2. At least when I looked at the bookstores this week.

Which comes to the title of this post, the Popular student card. I saw ad in newspaper that Popular Gurney Plaza is having member sale from 26-28 October 2011 for all books and revision books. This is only for members. However the ad kinda mislead me to believe that new application for member card will have free gift. Because student card application and renewal is NOT ENTITLED :( Oh ok, so it is just RM10 for 2-year membership, only for students age 7-12 years old.

So far the discount I got is RM10.40 for today's purchase. And I got 2 almost freebie, one is mechanical pencil and one memo pad for RM0.10 each with newspaper coupon. So actually the card is fully giving discount of 10% or whatever rebate given by Popular (sometimes they have 20% or 30% rebate) for the next 2 years. This is actually better savings than MPH Kidz Club membership if the title is the same, as the Popular student card is cheaper. However most of the time, the titles available at MPH and Popular is not really of the same genre. If your children need revision books, go for Popular student card if there's a school-going 7 to 12-year-old in your household. Do note that only certain books get discount with the card as "nett-priced items" do not get the discount. "Nett-priced items" are the ones where price tag will say "NETT", for example some revision books are nett-priced items (not all), magazines are nett price items.

I'd be on constant lookout for Popular member sale now that I'm a member our princess is a student member. Those 20% or 30% rebate do add up.

As for Borders, it's out of my target now especially after I bought an Enid Blyton Rewards book at RM16.90 with no discount. I found the same book at Popular and MPH going for only RM10.90. ARGH! My pain when I saw the price tag!