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DYNAMIC student Elham Abbas Ali-Yousif has astonished her teachers by achieving a string of academic accolades in recent months ... and will be putting her learning skills to the test in an American adventure.
The 15-year-old student of Al A'ahd Al Zaher Secondary Girls School, a government school in Hamad Town, Elham has just finished her Grade 10 and is packing her bags to travel to the American city of Wisconsin to complete a year studying at Menomenie High School as part of a US exchange scholarship programme.
The enthusiastic Bahraini boasts a room full of awards that she has won through the course of her studies.
Her most recent prize is Kumon's 'Higher Level Student's Award for Maths and English for Europe and the Middle East' - the only student from the region to gain the honour.
Elham travelled with her mother, Fatima, to Manchester in the north of England in April, to receive the award.
The teenager has mastered the advanced college level calculus and was under the cyber-guidance of Thomas Neumann, the Maths mentor of Kumon in the UK. She joined the programme in September 2004.
Kumon is an international Maths and English after-school study programme with three centres in Bahrain.
Elham said: "At first I didn't want to join at all but only did so because my older sister Ahlam, 21, was studying and excelled in it. I decided to take up a challenge of going to the highest level possible in Bahrain to make my mother proud.
"My mother and my sister are my role models because my mother works very hard and has instilled in me the merits of hard work and my sister's achievements has inspired me to aim high and excel."
Big sister Ahlam is an outstanding pianist who has won many competitions and is also studying presently in the US on a music scholarship in Kentucky.
But the road to excellence hasn't been without its challenges. Since Elham's medium of instruction in school was Arabic, she initially found Kumon very confusing and had to think in Arabic and work out the calculations in English. But she persevered and with constant encouragement shone through.
Elham is also a keen poetess in French and was the only student at Alliance Francaise to win a poetry award.
Her command over English is also exemplary and her confidence was evident when she took to the stage in an auditorium full of parents and children at a recent Kumon Awards ceremony at the Indian school in Bahrain. She also won the Toastmasters Leadership Award in April for being an outstanding student.
Although there is no precise formula to ensure that a child will be an A-list student and a high achiever, Fatima, who is a proud parent of two girls and a boy, all three being outstanding in some form or the other, simply says: "I have always believed in letting my children strive for rewards and kept them away from material things as making it easy for them will make them accept mediocrity.
"Constant support and encouragement is the key and to know when to push them towards something and when to step back. But, above all, time and commitment to children is the best investment in them."
As Elham moves to the US, the self-professed 'tomboy' is presently keeping herself busy by working at Kumon now as a tutor, playing violin, basketball, ice-skating and reading volumes of National Geographic. She has her sights set firmly on an American IVY League institution to study Applied Maths and Computer Science.
