Bahasa for SE

This is SE crying over her schoolwork.  At almost 6 years old, she is struggling to read.  My mom focuses on Mandarin - I managed to change her over to the Mandarin stream at her kindy this year, which is great but still means she only has one year to get ready for P1 at a Chinese school.

I don't know how to read...

A couple of months back, I started with her on Dr Seuss for English.  Well luckily she didn't turn out to be as bad as I feared.  And by now she does recognise some basic words.  We only do reading on weekends.

I thought I'd leave BM (Bahasa) for later.  But recently her kindy teachers took it upon themselves to impose a new rule: Students are only allowed to go swimming when they can read the allocated number of pages in the BM book!  Poor SE... she so looks forward to swimming day and now she can only watch her classmates swim.  I believe she was fibbing initially on why her swimsuit was dry that day - teacher was sick, teacher was not there, she was waiting for a friend who was slow and who borrowed her pencil.

I didn't catch on for a few weeks until another parent mentioned the rule to me.  Hmmmm.  I'm not in favour of this punishment - what happened to letting kids develop at their own pace?  I went to talk to the teacher and she confirmed it.  She kept saying that since homework was recently abolished, if not for this rule then kids will just go home and play.  At least they didn't plan to apply the rule every single week and SE got to swim that week.

Still, what to do.  Gotta get her up to speed on BM now.

"Marilah berkenalan dengan ahli keluarga saya.
Setiap hujung minggu, keluarga saya kumpul bersama-sama."

Come-lah get to know the members of my family.
Every weekend, my family gathers together.

Why oh why can't the words be kept to 2 or 3 syllables??  The tears are real.  :(

Cannot! WAaaAAA!!!