HomeSchool - Shapes and Colour, 'Colorama'

We've had this game at home for more than a year now. We've played with it randomly in the past, but I don't T got the hang of it. We took it out again this week and tried again. Seems that she now understands how the game is played and even attempted to cheat by trying to manipulate dice to help her win.

Its a good game to teach young children about colours and shapes and helps me to add another fun lesson on our homeschool curriculum rather than just rely on flashcards.

HomeSchool - Concept of time and routine

One of the goals in T's homeschool curriculum for age 3 yrs, is to introduce her to the concept of time and have her maintain her own routine. I doubt I am able to get her to be able to tell the time on the clock at this young age, but I think she should at least be able to recognise the difference between morning, noon and night and what her responsibilities are during these different times of the day.

So I draw up this graphical time-table for her and posted it up for her in our home. She seemed to be very attracted to the idea and enjoyed looking at her photos on it. We went through the schedule together and she was able to tell me from the photos what she was suppose to be doing at the allocated time

Example : I told her that she is suppose to wake up every morning at 7 o'clock and pointed out the clock to her, then I asked her, so after you wake up what should you do? and pointed at the photo, she tells me go pee pee. I reply 'yes, go pee pee and poo poo, brush, teeth and wash face. and then what do you do?' and I point to the next photo. she says ' eating'. and I continue, yes, and after eating breakfast, what do you do? and she says 'go to school'

So we went through the whole the whole schedule until repeated a few times, after which , she can now recite the routine without being prompted.

I think its good to have the child's routine visible to them. I feel it really helps them to establish the ability to self care and instill some discipline. It's only been less than a week that I put this time-table up, and it already saved me a few arguements with T about night time shower and bedtime. I just tell her and when tried to escape from her night time shower. 'Its eight o'clock now, and mummy finished playing with you. What are you suppose to be doing now.' She walks over to look at her notice board and come back to tell me meekly 'shower and read story books'. Battle won, no arguement.

I intentionally used the graphic of the analog clock so that it can help to give her the concept of how to use the clock to tell the time and slowly as she learns to read the numerals and understands how long hand and short hand works, she may tell the time for herself.

Once again, pink was also picked intentionally, as this is still her favorite colour for now and perhaps can keep her interest in this time-table longer.

HomeSchool - Lower case alphabet matching card

I recently made some purchases from www.thehomelibraryonline.com after reading some recommendations from the owner on her blog www.thedomusacademy.com She used 'Explode the code - wall chart activity' to introduce alphabets and phonics to her 3 yr old and I thought I would give it a try too.

The manual recommended to first let the child recognise the form of the letter before attempting to introduce the sound of the letter to them. This made sense. What's the point of learning F sounds like 'fer' and T sounds like 'ter' if they keep mixing up these letters anyways (Our T is mising up these 2 letter and a few others, but get say 20 of them correct mostly).

Anyways, after playing with the wall chart a few times, I found it cumbersome to have to take it out, hang it up, keep it afterwards. So I made a simple cardboard matching game myself and here's T playing with it. Pink is her current favorite colour, so I use pink to keep her attracted to her 'toy'.

Go ahead and make one for your toddler / pre-schooler too. Its a fun matching game and helps introduce pre writing / reading skills. To make the card more sturdy, you just have to laminate it.

I'll probably make another one for the upper case letters and also one for numbers 1 to 20 soon.

HomeSchool Planning

To set the records straight again. We do not have the intention to fully homeschool our little T for the time being. However, we believe that we can do more as parents for a preschooler / kindergatener than solely rely on the rigid traditional school system.

It is not about trying to make her the smartest kid around, but our bigger concern is to try to cultivate her interest in learning and encourage self motivation. I always worry about the method and approach to learning/teaching and how it can influence a person for live on what education / learning is about.

Give an example. During T's year end review with her school teacher. Teacher disclosed that T does not boldly use colours in her drawings and looks very 'stressed' and always colour only in one area of the picture. She doesn't seem 'creative' and 'confident' enough to change her colours and colour outside of an area. I was quite surprise about this as T is complete opposite at home. She keeps changing colours, is very happy and makes a 'mess' of colouring all over the page. After a short discussion, we concluded that in school, teacher always reminds them to colour nicely / neating, try not to go over the line, so as a result, the colouring session becomes more demanding than simply colouring as you wish. That is why T then opts to just stick to one colour and only one area. On the other hand, during our 'toilet wall' painting sessions at home, there's no limit set on what she can draw and we don't judge her for quality of drawing / colouring. For me, at 2.5 years, I really don't mind if her apple looks like a triangle and a pink blob of paint is a pretty flower to her. I think at this young age, its more important to encourage them to continue to draw / colour, be bold to use all the different colours / mode of arts as they wish and when they are older we can slowly introduce the rules of the game. I understand that traditional schools are there to teach the child the rules of society, to conform and obey, to respect and not question authority, etc..., but there are other approaches to life too.

This is the main reason why we try to maintain some homeschooling activities at home, so I can have a chances to expose her to less traditional method of learning, encourage her to attempt to solve the problems and find answers by herself and also observe for myself her strengths and weaknesses. Being 1 to 1, I can adapt our materials and lessons to her learning style and making timely decisions to change our lessons to match her current interests (windows of opportunities).

I realised these weeks when we try to pick up on the homeschooling that I lack a focus and direction on this topic. What we do is too random and ad hoc and I have no clue if the activities are age appropriate, if I am missing an important element to build a good foundation, if we are moving in the correct direction? As such, I also spend / waste alot time doing random research and getting distracted by all sorts of information that I think may be of interest, but might not really be useful. The conclusion, some proper planning needs to be in place so we can be more efficient and effective in our efforts.

So I put aside 2 whole days and seriously researched into preschool / kindergarten education. First was to find out what are the norm milestones for a 3-4 year old to reach, second was to think about besides these basics, what other 'stuff' to we wish T to learn during this time? Lastly was to organize the information in such a way so that we can make lesson plans and easily track and follow up on how we are progressing until we achieve the goals.

I gathered the info online from a variety of sites, reviewed, filtered and consolidated what I felt was reasonable for 3 - 4 yr old into the below charts. (I haven't figured out how to put downloadable files on blog, so if you are interested, you will have to print them or save them as photos). For curriculum planning and tracking, I referred to http://www.donnayoung.org/ and got some templates and ideas from her, made some customization and now I have a thin binder book to help me track our homeschool progress. If you are interested in taking a look at my homeschool planner book, drop me a line in the chatbox. With these tools in hand + my Montessori pre-school teaching manuals + the lovely BFIAR recommended curriculum for lapbooking, I now feel alot more confident that we will be able to have an enriching and enjoyable preschool home school experience at home. I also no longer spend alot of time browsing and researching like a headless chicken and wasting alot of time, instead, I just have to put aside a couple of minutes a day, or an hour on the weekend to plan ahead for next week's activities. Its been a great time saver (goes to explain why I have time to update the blog now)

By the way, we've worked on 2 more BFIAR books these weeks, stay tuned for post on them once we finished.

HomeSchool - Paper Puppets dress up

Was surfing online for preschool activities and came across THIS. The dolls were just too adorable to give them a miss. We've seen similar items in shops selling at high prices. So I printed these free of charge and got the help of maid and AhBeeJie with the cutting. To make them last longer, I laminated all the pieces. Its fun to play dress up and pretend play slumber party, holloween, christmas etc... While doing so, we also talk about colours, enhanced vocabulary with the many different types of clothings (dress, skirt, trousers, shorts, boots, shoes, sneakers, slippers, etc...). Hold 2 way conversations. Can even re-enforce sorting skill and organization by catergorizing the clothings (all shoes together, all tops together, all bottoms together etc...) Hee hee... then later she can tidy up her wardrobe by herself.

See.... with a little bit of creativity, big lessons can be learnt in the midst of a fun game session

Montessori - Practical Life Skills - Using Tongs

Read HERE for a full description of this Montessori activity.

We reused things around the house to do this. Mini muffin tray, a bowl of peanuts (same pack as those we used for dry pouring activity we did a year ago), a pair of tongs.

Then I showed her how to use the tongs and instructed her to put 1 nut in each compartment, moving gradually from left to right, top to bottom. When she is done, she put the nut back into the bowl, then I instructed this time to put 2 nuts in each compartments, and so on...

See from the photo how focused little children can be when doing this kind of work.

To them it is fun work, in the process they gain:

- fine motor skill practise

- holding tongs properly >>> early practise to holding pencils properly (pre-writing skills)

- maths >>> counting 1, 2, 3....

- math >>> fractions, seeing how a bowl of nuts can be divided into so many small portions

- science >>> how to visual volume of the bowl of nuts changes as it gets separated into so many portions, and be restored back into the same bowl later.

Montessori - Sensorial - Sound Boxes

Click HERE for full description of the activity.

Once again, I found it too costly to purchase the authentic Montessori material, so I made my own.

- Containers pack of 6 purchased from $2 dollar shop. You can use any suitable small containers that you have at home. Just make sure that they all look the same.
- contents, all free. Found from things around the house.
- tray to hold container purchased from $2 shop.

A good thing about making your own sound boxes is that you can change the materials in the box whenever you wish to adapt to the abilities of your child. It is always good to start off with something easy that makes distinctively very different sounds, then slowly increase the difficulty by changing the contents of the boxes to produce more similar sounds.

BFIAR - Caps For Sale

Now that my MS has improved alot, we made an effort to continue with our BFIAR homeschool program. I must admit BFIAR is a great program to start off with for little children younger than 4. There is nothing academic about it (unless you intentionally make it so). There's plenty of fun activities recommended in the manual and loads more that you can find from the web. Once again, just be very observant and sensitive to the needs of your child and add a bit of creativity to customise the activities to make the learning experience one that your child will love.

Once again, we used the resources from HomeSchoolShare site and printed out this find the item sheet. It's a little like "Where's Wally". T has to find all the items listed at the side of the sheet on the colour picture and circle them out. Surprising, she did very well and found all of them quickly. I noticed she enjoyed this activity and must make it a point to self make some more activities similar to this one.

We did some colouring activity here where she various medium of art. First with crayon, then with water colour. She doing the watch colouring, she started off nicely painting each cap a different colour. But somehow towards the end to decided to get abstract and started to splash colours randomly all across the the page.

Here we did some maths counting activity. On an earlier occasion, I attempted to introduce T to counting and numbering using this . It was too difficult for her to relate the quantity in the picture to the number dots. Somehow 3 bears and got nothing to do with 3 black dots, so why should they be the same? (this is what I decipher from her expression). So I gave it some thought and used Caps for Sale story to re-introduce sequencial counting to her. While reading the story, we were already counting the caps and monkeys in the book, so monkeys and caps are something very close to her heart now. I made out our own worksheets for her to match the correct number of caps to the monkeys. I made it a point that the 'lenght' of the the monkeys and caps were the same so that she increament of number is visual to her and this game is self correcting. (Eg. 1 monkey = same lenght as 1 cap, 5 monkeys = same length as 5 caps. If she matches a wrong number of caps to monkeys, she will have a cap with no monkey or a monkey with no cap). After a few rounds of me explaining and helping her along, she can now easily match correctly up to number 5. So knowing that she can now count accurately and not just blindly recite the numbers (which she does very well), we moved on to do something a little more difficult. The second worksheet (from HomeSchoolShare) requires the child to count and write to number. Since T has yet to learn the numerals and I don't intend to teach her that yet, I adapted it and asked to to draw the same number of circles as the monkeys she counted (similar concept - 1 monkey - 1 drawn circle, 4 monkeys = 4 drawn circles). With the laid foundation, she understood it easily and enjoyed drawing the matching number of circles.

Here we made a paper plate monkey mask and had a good 30 minutes of fun just chasing each other around the house. As you can see here, T is wearing a red cap pretending to be a monkey and I was the peddlar who had to run after her shouting "Give Me Back My Caps".

Some other activities that we did included :

- stacking a whole lot of caps on our heads and walking around the house shouting "Caps for Sale, fifty cents a cap".

- doing another print out worksheet which matched action verbs to the correct picture (Sitting, Jumping, etc... action words mentioned in the story). When learning the words (actually T knew all the words already), we played out each action exaggerately.

- T pretending to sleep and I hid the caps around the house and she has to find the caps around the house.

There are still alot of other activities that can be done with this story such as :

- making monkey bread

- introducing the concept of money

- learning about different domination of money

- learning about different types of monkeys

- learning about different types of hats and their uses....

there's so much so much that I am not able to list all here right now.

For now, I think we (or me) have had enough of this story for now. We shall try to move on to another story (target to do 1 story every 2 weeks) and maybe revisit this this one when T is older.

Achievement - Reading by own self

I feel very proud and comforted to know that I have successfully cultivated a reader. I hope T will maintain this love for books. We have been reading to her daily since she was born (OK, maybe not every single day, but 8 out of 10 is good enough for us). Her nightly routine goes like this. Evening shower at about 8:30pm, brush teeth, change into diapers and pyjamas and reading on the bed before lights out at 9pm. Nowadays, even if we don't sit and read with her, she will spontaneously go to her room and take out her book after she finish her shower. She sits by herself and starts 'reading' out loud to herself. Its really very cute to see this. She is not able to recognise any word yet, but she recalls the storyline of the familiar stories. If she pulls out a book that we have yet to read together, she will 'make up' her own story by looking at the pictures. I think the BFIAR program has played a part in why she seems more keen in reading at last few months as compared to the earlier 2 years. All the BFIAR storys are truly living books and the activities and animations that we do with each story cultivated her strong interest in each of them. The Green Pocketbook has been her favorite for 2 months and she has been asking for Caps for Sale everyday this month.

Montessori - Sensorial - Mystery Bag

This week, we tried for the first time the Montessori Mystery Bag activity and it was loads of fun. Read HERE for a full description of this activity.

We started off with the most familiar items that T loved. Her colourful threading beads that she has been playing with for the past year. These beads were 3 dimensional and all the basic shapes were there (there was even a fish shape).

Getting Ready :

Display all the diffrent shapes out and name and feel with eyes closed each one. (We had ball/circle, cube/square, triangle, star, heart, fish)

Activity 1 :

To start off simple, I put just 1 item in the bag without T knowing what it is and she will have to feel it and tell me what it is. We keep repeating until we finished all the shapes.

Activity 2 :

I put all the items in the bag and ask her to feel and bring out only the item that I call for. This is more difficult and requires more focus to get it right.

This activity refines her sense of touch and requires her to be focused in order to feel the correct shapes. We started off very giggly and she kept wanting to peep into the bag. You can repeat the activity introducing the name of the shapes in different language, but we didn't do that yesterday since it was our first try at this and I didn't want to spoil the fun.

HomeSchool Activities for the past weeks

Finally the 1st Trimester is over and I am feeling more 'normal' now. We tried to get our homeschooling back on track. Here are some of the activities that we have done over the past weeks.

Sorting beads by colour.

The same set of coloured beads can be played in several ways. In this game, I made the first colour sequence and T has to repeat the same sequence using the remaining beads.

We continued practising finger dexterity with this threading toy. I noticed her fine motor skills are pretty good for her age and she does enjoy this threading game. I made her a necklace and she made me one too. We wore it around the house for the afternoon.

We tried to practise some writing skills with this set of Kumon cards. We did succeed in 'writing' all the alphabets. However, personally, I don't fancy these cards that much for the following reasons :
1. the marker included is too fine/thin for a 2.5 yr old proper handling
2. some of the picture for the alphabet were too confusing / difficult.
3. the cards didn't show clearly the proper directions have the stokes the alphabet should be written in.
I think I shall soon be making my own cards.

Thank You Rosaryhill Teachers

The school year finished 3 weeks earlier due to the H1N1 swine flu scare. All pre-schools and primary schools in Hong Kong have been closed since 8/Jun and the official school year should have ended at end of June. The summer classes may also be cancelled if the health situation doesn't improve.

T has been having a blast of time at home as AhBeeJie is at our place everyday and the 2 of them gets along really well.

We went to school this weekend to collect her year end report card and T made thank you cards to give to her teachers as a show of her appreciation.

Achievements - 16 piece jigsaw puzzle

We've had a few boxes of jigsaw puzzles in the house for more than a year now, but T never seemed really interested in working on them alone. I noticed that she got impatient very quickly and gave up easily on this task. I let her be, thinking her time will come.

Admittedly, when I started reading that other children her age are working well with puzzles, peer pressure got me thinking that that I should 'encourage' her to work harder at this.

We took out these boxes of puzzles again and I sat down with her to start off with the 4 piece puzzles, slowly up to 6 piece. In the beginning stages, she would understandly get upset when she cannot fit a puzzle and throw a small temptrum when I refuse to do it for her. We will have to patiently give her hints and tips on how to go about finding the correct pieces and surprising, after a few sessions over the last 6 weeks, she managed to finish a 12 piece puzzle by herself last night and complete a 16 piece puzzle with a few verbal hints from me.

Once again, this experience just re-enforces the message that it is ever so important to stay observant to your child's needs and provide the neccessary stimuli to help them. It is not about pressuring them into the standard of the societly, but more about just gently introducing and exposing them to areas of interest and be able to adapt teaching method to their individual requirement and make the whole learning experience enjoyable.

On this jig saw puzzle experience, T has changed from one who will just throw puzzle pieces on the floor 6 weeks ago, to the child who asks to do more puzzles last night. In fact, when she asked to do the 16 piece puzzle, I explained to her that it be too difficult, but she retorted : "No, Mummy, I can do it". So we tried and she did it.

The next page on the puzzle book was a 20 piece puzzle. When she looked at it she told me "Mummy, I think this one is too difficult for me". I am very pleased that she is willing to push her own limits and knows when to stop when she had enough.

Let's play more

My MS is good on some days and bad on others. I days when I don't feel so tired, I try to do some simple activities with T at home. Here's T having a go with the Montessori cylinder blocks.

She's pretty good when its just 1 block, but when 3 is put together, she has yet to finish it.








This magnetic playhouse is one of T's favourite toy in recent months. She takes it out quite often to play. This day, I recall an episode in Desperate Housewife where the children in school were requested to draw pictures of their family and they ended up portraying embarrassing images of their family.
I couldn't help feeling that we must be doing something right in our family when I see T playing with her toy family. She puts mummy and daddy sitting on the sofa and 2 children sitting on mummy's and daddy's lap.

HomeSchool - Big & Small

I can't emphasize how important it is for parents to whole-heartedly play with their child and be attentive to them when they are playing. In the past week, I noticed that T was confusing "BIG" with "Small". She would ask me for a piece candy and says she wants a small piece. But when I give it to her, she would point to a bigger piece in the packet and say no not this one, I want a small piece. And so I realised that she got her concepts wrong.

I printed some picture cards off the internet to show the difference between BIG & SMALL. We made 12 sets of pictures, each with a big image and the same image in small size. We took out a big & small plastic bowl and we sorted the picture cards into the correct bowl. As we put the card in the bowl used the "Montessori Three Period Lesson" to re-enforce the concept of big and small.

"Three Period Lesson"
1st Round -
Mum says : This is a big flower, please put the big flower in the big bowl. This is a small flower, please put the small flower in the small bowl. (Repeats this sequence till the all cards are completed)

2nd Round -
Mum says : Which one is the big flower, can you please put the big flower in the big bowl. Which is the small flower, can you please put the small flower in the small bowl. (Repeats till all cards are completed)

3rd Round -
Mum takes a card and asks : What is this?
T replies : Big flower !

HomeSchool - Sticker Book

What is it with young kids and stickers. They just seem to love stickers. T received some sticker books from Auntie Christine for Christmas and we had plenty of fun with them. She also enjoyed the Kumon "Let's Sticker and Paste" books. I recently found some nursery worksheets in a local book store. I must say, some of these worksheets really scared me. They expected 3 year olds to be able to identify chinese characters and spell some simple english words. Well, I definately didn't get these books, as I did not see myself being able to teach her at this young age to write and spell.

After digging in the pile, I managed to find something more fun. It was from a Taiwanese publisher. It was a colourful sticker book which helps kids identify colours, shapes, patterns, sequencing, etc... I think this is something both T and I would enjoy and we did. Its easy to take out this book every evening and just do 1 - 2 pages of the activity with T.

HomeSchool - Animal cards

Following up on our trip to the zoo last month, we worked on the theme of animals these 2 weeks. We watched some videos about animals and talked about them. I home made some animals matching cards to play with. I found photos (I realised that it makes more sense to work with real photos than cartoon pictures when learning about stuff) on the internet of various animals and paired them by adult animal and baby animal. We also printed the name on the adult and baby animal at the bottom on the photos (Eg. kangaroo vs joey, cat vs kitten, cow vs calf). This way, T can learn a few more words and when doing the matching. She has to be more observant on the similarities of the animals (a kitten looks very much like a tiger cub without its stripes) (the size, shape and colour of a hippo and rhino loost very alike too) Daddy plays this matching game with her too and they will learn the cantonese names of these animals. All 3 of us enjoys this name alot. Again I am a proud mummy when she says "Hippopotamus"

Rambling : I really felt very "auntie" when I was trimming the self laminated cards on my bus ride home. But kept telling myself its better to make use of the time on the bus journey despite the stares from the onlookers, rather than to take time off with T just to cut and trim these cards.

BFIAR - The Big Green Pocketbook, Part 2

This is the lapbook and activities that we did for 'The Big Green Pocketbook'. We haven't finished all the activities yet, so we shall be adding more into this lapbook as we go along.

We had the day trip to Lamma Island and bought T her own 'pocketbook' to put her 'memories' in. Its been 2 weeks now and she still like this bag and brings it along when we go out on the weekends.






Identified the names of the things that the girl in the story had in her pocketbook. Show T what a real calendar looks like and explained its use. (but I don't think she understood).
Asked her to recall the things the girl had in her bag and let T put it into her 'paper' bag when she recalled them correctly.





Coloured scoops for ice cream and had lots of fun 'eating' them.
1. identify colours
2. count numbers
3. concept of addition and subtraction as we 'ate' the ice cream and 'refilled' the cone
4. proper manner, as we asked daddy and helper if they would like to have some ice cream






Coloured paper cut outs of a box of crayons. Tried to identify colours. T still cannot name colours. Also did these :

1. pairing the same colour
2. hide and find the crayons
3. counting the crayons



We identified some things that were green and painted them. I assisted her using the scissors to cut our the pictures and she pasted them in the book.


We can probably make a little pocket in this and continue to insert pictures of green coloured things as we find them in our daily activities.







Since there was so much green in this book, I got the idea teach T how to make green colour. We squeezed a blob for blue paint and yellow point into a ziplock bag and she squashed it all around and see how it gradually turns green (I think there was too much blue, cos our green turned out very dark)

We also went to the bank on a weekend and she got to see the bank teller counting the coins she saved.

I had the idea of bringing her to the laundrymat and asking the lady there to show her how the rotating clothes hanger works, but I haven't got round to doing that yet.