Tips on cooking porridge

I realised I couldn't cook really nice porridge; it always seemed like rice, haha. But anyway I watched my mum cook again that day.. so this is a step by step way of cooking porridge:

1) Let the porridge soak in the water that you are going to cook in for about 1 hour
2) Boil the porridge
3) White stuff will float up after some time when water is boiling and according to my mum, they are impurities, so just scoop them up from the surface
4) Stir the porridge from time to time
5) After a while, when you see the rice has soften into porridge, can turn off the fire

Sometimes, my mum will also add pumpkin in to make the porridge sweeter