My daddy & my son

Recently Jen has been sticky to my dad, wanting only him to hold his hand, wanting to drink milk only on my dad's bed with my dad lying next to him... I think it's incredibly sweet and I hope both of them will continue to share a strong bond together...

Postive Parenting - Developing our interests in Reading & Writing

We all know that reading is essential for us to hone our language skills and cultivating this good habit will inevitably influence the way we write. Creative writing is a strong focus in our schools and I have seen some of the compositions that our Primary school children have written. And I tell you, they completely BLEW my mind! I'm half wondering if I should start my K2 girl on Enid Blyton's books but deep inside, I know that she isn't ready for that yet. Nevertheless, it does no harm to instill good reading habits at a young age and just how do we go about that?

Developing your Child's Reading and Writing, part of a series of Positive Parenting workshops organized by Julia Gabriel Centre really helped solve the many doubts that I had and I appreciated the opportunity to be invited to attend it. Julia Gabriel and her wonderful, chirpy daughter-in-law, Aggie put Dw and my minds at ease with their various methods of engaging children and developing a literacy rich home environment. This is the start to building the foundation for reading and writing, something which will follow our children for their lifetime. 

The no. 1 rule which was stressed to us at the onset was: We, as parents, have to be readers if we want our children to be readers! Totally true! Go take a look at Tom and Pippo Read a Story to know exactly what we are talking about. So, start reading! Newpapers, magazines, novels, they all work!

 

 

We were given time to role play. We took turns to read to each other, pretending the listener was our child. It was quite awkward initially, given that we had to constantly change our voice pitch to suit the mood of the book and had to be very expressive to gear to the tone that will retain the interest of the child. Apart from simply reading words, we should also give attention to the pictures in the book and elaborate on them. Afterall we are talking to little children and these pretty, colourful pictures are more than likely to catch their attention then just plain, black words which probably do not make much sense at their age!

We all know as well, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy... so yes, PLAY! Use our imagination and creativity to create fun games by taking the concepts from our favourite childhood games like Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly!

 

A natural progression from reading is writing. We were shown the different tools used by Julia Gabriel Centre for their Pre-School education classes to help children of various age groups develop their writing skills. Finger paints, fat pencils, pencil grips, these were just a few of the many instruments introduced to us. Kids have it lucky these days, don't they! I certainly didn't have this luxury when I was in Pre-school!

 

 

 

So with fat pencils at 3, we get scribble writing... like Jen's master piece:

 

 

I look forward to the time when he gets to N2 next year and goes on to the 2nd stage: emergent writing, which essentially means that he will be drawing pictures that depict a story. Something which Jill still enjoys doing now, at K2! She will draw and tell us why she drew the bees, the butterflies, the flowers and what were they doing prior to flying etc. 

 

With these little steps, it will eventually lead to the 3rd stage in K2, whereby our children will then write for a reason. They write to tell a story on why recycling is important and what they do for recycling. They write recipes, how they bake cookies. They write grocery lists, they write rules of games they play. The list goes on, you get the idea... 

I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the workshops, especially Critical Thinking on 24 Oct, which is an extremely important skill that will benefit our children in many aspects of their lives. Lifelong skills like effective analysing, reasoning, evaluating and creativity are all parts of Critical Thinking and are the building blocks for problem solving and communicating rational solutions. If any of you are keen, do contact Julia Gabriel Centre to find out more and you are definitely still in time to enjoy the 10% if you sign up for your 3rd workshop!

Legoland Malaysia

Laval (Legends of Chima) - the 1st mascot we met

Yeah, title is bo-orrrr-ring. Thousands have been there & hundreds have blogged about it. I'm one of those sua-ku ones who have not been there & HENCE, I WAS FREAKING EXCITED about this overnight trip. In fact, on Friday, I kept telling my colleagues that I was so - oh going overseas the next day.. hahahah and yes, they were all rolling their eyes (make that  x 1000 times) at me.

Anyway, I think it suffices to say that Dw was 1000 times MORE excited than me, because it was his 1st time driving into Malaysia & he was so darn hyped up that he couldn't even sleep the night before. My turn to roll my eyes 1000 times... but that's okay, I still love my dear to the max for his "cuteness".

And so we drove in, 2 kiddos behind, Dw at the wheel and I, the passenger with eyes peeled to street signs. It was just a little congested at the Tuas checkpoint but other than that, it was a smooth and uneventful (fortunately) drive in. The kids started screaming when they spotted the infamous Legoland colourful hotel and all the adrenalin kicked in from that point onwards. Didi had a ball with all the lego pieces and rides that he refused to nap and ended up nodding off during our early dinner at KFC. That episode was really funny and we couldn't resist taking a video of him.Totally adore this little boy of ours!



our 1st glimpse of the hotel

view from our room

Playing with mini legos at the hotel lobby

We were lucky that it was not that crowded last weekend, possibly due to exam period in Singapore and Saturday was the end of the weekend for people of  Johore. So that effectively also meant Sunday was crowd free and that also meant that we could take the rides consecutively, sometimes without even needing to disembark if there was noone else in the queue! Somehow, whilst Jill enjoyed going round & round in Project X and the Dragon roller coaster, Dw & I were... er... can we stop, our heads are spinning.. It's age. We're aging. Damn.



selfie on project X

the dragon apprentice



the dragon

Then Didi had the whale of his time, easily satisfied sitting in the Duplo Express & at the Boating School. Again, Dw and I were.. er.. can we stop, it's making us sleepy. zzzzzzz....in another sense, it was rather therapeutic.


choo choo... slow & steady

@ the boating school

All in all, we had good fun, the kids had more fun so it was a simply fabulous weekend, just the 4 of us spending time together as a family. Service was great at both the park & hotel with friendly, smiling staff over the 2 days. One thing though I did wish the hotel had informed us in advance that hotel guests with combo tickets have the privilege to gain access to Leogcity at 9.30am so we could have gone in much earlier on our 1st day. So now YOU know... it's great especially when you have kids who wanna have a go at the Nissan Driving school which I've always heard is often one heck of a long queue!



nissan driving school

ending our little vacation with souvenirs from the retail shops

Daddy bonds...

Usually when I ask the daddy to babysit the kids, it's often the case where each kid will be having their own tablet and either playing games or watching some video on You tube with him as the supervisor on his own tablet. Pet peeves I admit but nothing serious... over the years, I've grown accustomed to this. This is how daddies are and it's not unique to him. I see this happening to other daddies & their kids at malls, at the doctors', everywhere... Of course I do wish that the daddy can do other stuff with them like teaching them ABCs, doing art & crafts, reading etc but that doesn't happen without specific instructions from me, the terrorizing mummy. But that's the difference between him and me and instead of trying to pick on this difference, I've learnt to appreciate it and be grateful for daddy's presence which I know is a very privileged one as not all children have that.

Nonetheless, it's always a refreshing change when I see the daddy and children bonding over stuff other than tablets. Like how I was out one night and I received photos on how he was bonding with Jill. And, just the other night, after my usual nightly revisions with Jill, I walked into the bedroom and was pleasantly surprised to see father & son so warm & loving! Such a rare sight, that i just HAD TO take these photos sneakily for keeps!

my do-re-mi

Took this on the way out to lunch yesterday... This is Jen's favourite position at the moment, saves him the agony of trying to catch up with us with his short, fudgy legs and at the same time, having a bird's eye view of everything that's around him!

Jill's dropped her 1st tooth! - 28 Oct 2013

It was an exciting morning for Jill! She woke up & as usual played with her loose bottom tooth. The next thing she knew it was hanging at the tip!

DW was not at home & I definitely didn't dare to yank it out. But poor girl, she was probably excited, anxious and scared all at the same time. Highly confused. I brushed her teeth as per our usual morning routine, just alot gentler and told her to be extra careful before I left for work.

On the way to work, she called me, happily annoucing that our helper had helped her yank her tooth off and it didn't hurt at all and that she would keep her tooth nicely wrapped up & place it under her pillow for the tooth fairy.

At night, once she fell asleep, DW swopped her tooth with a $2 note. It never fails to make me smile at innocent children believing in the existence of fairies, it just makes the world a much better place to live in.

This morning, she woke up and the 1st thing she told me was "the tooth fairy took my tooth away!! and she gave me $2!"... it was just a super "awwww I love you so much my (toothless) princess" moment and I just hugged her so tight for a full minute.

A Sunday with Julia

By DW

We usually spend our Sunday afternoons lazing at home or sometimes window shopping with the kids. This weekend was slightly different as we spent the afternoon at Julia Gabriel (Forum) with none other than Julia Gabriel herself. The topic was “Empowering Your Child with Speech and Language”, a topic that was of interest as we have 2 little ones.

Not knowing what to expect for activities for the kids, except that there was going to be story telling, we brought Jill and left Jen at home. Little did we know, that they had toys and art & craft activities (& not forgetting FOOD!!) all laid out for the young ones, poor didi got left out of the fun again. But Jill sure had a fun time. Thanks to Fiona & her team of enthusiastic teachers!

Ms Fiona Walker, Principal Director at Julia Gabriel Centre for Learning, working with Jill on her story of how the caterpillar grows into a butterfly.

Making her caterpillar, based on Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar

all time kids' favourite - story telling session!

 After settling all the kids down, the session started. A lot of the information was shared but a main point which we learnt was that it was imperative for us to create that environment for our children as they learn best if we immerse them in it. English wise, I don’t think it will be too much of an issue; Mandarin on the other hand is something that I am a little more concerned as Mandarin is not exactly my strong point.

We were also told that associations worked well too, an eg would be to have a situation where one parent speaks to the child in English and one parent in Mandarin or perhaps have designated "Mandarin speaking days". We did consider that but knowing that our Mandarin is what would be deemed as "pasar Mandarin", we have decided that it was best we outsourced this. However, we do have DVDs with Mandarin Songs which we play. Music never fails to ignite the life in children and it's one of the best ways to let them enjoy the language. Nevertheless Jill is starting to love Mandarin and if at any point she does initiate a conversation with us in Mandarin, we always very gladly reply to her in Mandarin as well.

A way to encourage our children to use it more, is to use cards that are labelled appropriately in Mandarin for Television, Bed, Cupboard, Refrigerator etc and use these cards to play games with them by labelling the item with the correct card, we can take it even further by doing it in both languages. Julia has very kindly offered to help us to get the right terminology in Mandarin for each object.

Us with Julia (right) & Fiona!

We would definitely need to make a greater effort to start learning with our children, also a suggestion that was made during the session. By doing that, I myself can refresh what I have learnt previously and at the same time encourage the kids to learn as well. Who knows that they may even start teaching us or better yet, we can even get Jill to teach Jen!

The group of parents (& kids) who participated in this session. Thanks to all for sharing your tips & ideas!