Free Audio Books

I just found this wonderful site with lots of children's audio books. Thought I put the link up here to share with everyone.

http://www.kiddierecords.com/

Can help to save some $$$ by downloading the audio files onto the MP3 player and let T listen to them.

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 - 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

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.

Acheivements - Bilingual Conversations

After 9 months of chinese immersion at the preschool, T's conversational cantonese has improved remarkably over the past 2 months. She will now voluntarily speak in cantonese to daddy and continues to converse in english with me. I am nicely surprised that she can make her own direct translations at times.

Incident 1 -
T : Mummy see, I 'dirty cat'.
Me : huh? what is dirty cat, there is no cat here.
T : see, my mouth, dirty cat
Me : there is no dirty cat in your mouth dear
T : (getting a little frustrated) Mummy, I eat ice cream, see my mouth, dirty cat. Tissue please.
Only at this moment did I get it. Dirty cat = cantonese direct translation "Wu1 zhuo1 mao1", meaning dirty person.

Incident 2 -
T was drinking a packet drink and it was almost dinner time. I asked the maid to take the drink from her. Both Daddy and I were present. She complains to us (individually) immediately. She looks at Daddy and complains in Canto about the maid taking her drink and right after turns to look at me and repeats the same complain in English.