Arts Activity

It is my aspiration not to be a Tiger mom but to focus on a well balanced and holistic childhood for my kids (Sound too ambitious?) I always think being a Tiger or helicopter mom is easier cos we are more in control. I choose to put my kids happiness and safety as the first priority whenever I have to make decisions for them. 

Somehow, we are at the situation of having 3 enrichment class for lil Joy every week which she enjoys. I am tempted to send her for art classes to expand her horizon in the world of Arts which I love so much but I reckon it will be too heavy on our schedule. 

Instead, I try to incorporate an art activity every weekend. Here is us, redrawing a scene from Dr Seuss's book. I introduced to her chalk pastels and she gets to use the tongs to work on her pinch grasp.

Things seems fresh and fun for a moment.

Then she decided that it is easier to scrap the pigment onto the paper directly. 

We ended the session with a very brown hand and no photos of the final artwork. So sorry about the lousy documentations but I will work on it better next time.

Chinese activies

Lil Joy speaks mainly English to us, including her grandparents who does not understand much English. It is a concern to us, cause we are Chinese and we need to be able to appreciate this beautiful language and speak Mandarin.

Her school is English based, most of her classmates speaks English and I had to rack my brains to make the Chinese works. I signed her up for a Mandarin speech and drama class earlier this month. I reckon that a Chinese speaking activity will suffice instead of a serious sit down Chinese tuition class.

I am glad that she is starting to reply me in Mandarin sometimes and show no aversion to Chinese.

It occurred to me that I have not been introducing new words to her for a long time. I have also noticed that 80% of the (very few) characters which I have introduced to her earlier this year is retained in her memory when we are reading. I need buck up and squeeze in activities to download information now.

So I took out my Book 3 of 我会读 and started introducing her new words again. It is too dry to just flash the cards and so we did a bit of run around the house sticking the words onto the household items.






It is interesting to notice that Lil Joy does not know the Chinese names for some of the items..  But she has a great time running around the house pasting the cards and collecting them back.

Starting official school

Early October, I have enrolled lil Joy into an official school for her Nursery 2. It is a bit late cause we were left with the last term for this year. Nonetheless, it is better than nothing, this is one of the thing that we have to work around for our house move.

I have chosen the school based on Lil Joy's liking and the deposition of all the school teachers. Yes, ALL of them. It is a small school with 4 teachers and all of them are great, so I do not need to be in the mercy of the teachers' rooster. I really hate to be hoping for the nice teacher to teach my girl. 

School started with a glitch. We had the occasional crying from lil Joy when we drop her at school during the first 2 weeks and after that she is always running with joy towards the school door. So where is the glitch when she loves her school and the school teachers are great?

The teacher called me in on the first week, highlighting to me tat lil Joy couldn't write. I told her truthfully, I have not been teaching her how to write yet. The teachers were worried that she might have difficulty with her worksheets if she can't write in K1 next year. One teacher even offered to start a penmanship course for her. I asked them to give me a month and I will try to work on her writing. 

It was really one stressful month for me because I had to work out a routine with her to practice writing since our homeschool time slot had been taken up by her official school. Somehow, I managed to work out a 'one writing worksheet a day' routine after her afternoon nap. 

Thankfully, this month I am starting to receive feedbacks from her school teacher that she is improving on her writing and is able to copy simple words onto her exercise book. I even got a bonus when the teacher asked me in and lil Joy read a whole storybook to me. All these were achieved in the days when she happily go for classes.

With the more critical issue out of the way, I focus on another areas that I need to work on.