In the last post, I reviewed Hegura right brain training. For this post, I will write a review on Genius League.
tldr: First & foremost, I don’t believe in right brain training (applies to Heguru too). Compared to others, Genius League is sub-par in quality and management.
What is Genius League?
They are the local Singaporean verison of Heguru & Shichida. The founders copied from the Japanese counterpart, making it cheaper (around $50 vs $80 per lesson), and adapting the syllabus as they deemed fit.
They have classes for more ages; not just toddlers, but primary school too. We found a timing where we can send both Kate (8 years old) and Jade (3 years old), thus we went for the paid trial classes.
8yo Kate class
I accompanied Kate, and stayed in the classroom for 1.5h. They allow parents to accompany, but there is no reason to be there. No other parents were there.
There were only 2 other students in the class, and I chatted with them before the lesson start (the teacher was slightly late). They joined the class around 6 months ago. That is surprising as we were under the impression that the students would have trained since young.
I remembered being told along the lines:
We group the class by ability, not by age. For Kate, since she didn’t train at all, she might not be able to catch up with the other students (in terms of memory).
The 2 other students are indeed different ages, but they are not geniuses. One of the boy is hyper active, rolled himself in the curtain, while the teacher was helpless.
The lesson
They use flash cards. But compared to Heguru’s, they’re of a different level. The teacher is much slower. And with only 1 teacher, the pace to change activities is much slower too.
They have some memorization games. The teacher will show 3 numbers (eg. 11-222-33), ask them to memorize, then they have to write down. They did the “game” once, and then moved on to another game.
Next is a maze game. Nothing fancy, just a few maze puzzles on paper..
The most accomplished activity would be the story memorization with cards. That’s not new, but I like such activity in helping kids to memorize a story with a set of cards.
Plus English writing
They also spent a bulk of their time working on English creative writing. There is word bank, using good sentences to write their own story. As Kate attends other English enrichment classes, this is not new.
This English activity is unexpected for us. I don’t like it as it is neither here nor there.
After the lesson, I gave feedback on this, and was told there is another class that doesn’t cover this English writing..
3yo Jade class
For toddlers, they also have flash cards, and they use the same topic for January – Astronomy.
Once again, this is not surprising for right brain training; they won’t know the words, but it is fine. After lots of training, it will help their volcabuary for later on in life.
Toddler also have some music and dance activities. Participation wasn’t great from the other kids.
I won’t go into details, but their quality is still sub-par compared to Heguru classes.
After the trial, there is a “promotion” price, but we have to put a deposit right away. I can’t help feeling there is a bit of sale strategy at play.
Conclusion
I wasn’t impressed with the lessons. It isn’t something that will help the kids.
Plus after more research into right brain training, I believe their “benefits” are unproven. The same skepticals I had with Herugu.
Taking things further, Genius League even have a bonus online class that can improve your brain via EM wave! 🤯 😂 🚩