's'

Uh oh. It's been 3 months since my 'r' post.

Well, we've been sick, there've been parties and outings.... And I was so lazy. Hah. Actually, it's because I'm very disorganised and very bad at multitasking. So if I needed to, say, plan for something, or work on something, I need to do that one thing at a time. It just happened I had quite a lot of issues I wanted to clear that past few months. Haiz. I wish I was better at organising my life.

Anyway...

Keywords:
spider, sail, sun, sky, sea, slide

Projects:

Spider

We read a couple of books about spiders. Their life cycles, how they live, what they eat etc. I emphasized on the number of legs spiders have and reiterated that spiders are not insects since insects have 6 legs.

Then, we made spiders out of crushed unwanted magazine paper, garbage bag, pipe cleaners and paper. Most steps were easy enough even for Barry.

Mandy's:

 Barry's

I had them draw on the eyeballs and stick the eyes themselves. Then, they counted out 8 legs for their spiders. Mandy could poke the pipe cleaners through the garbage bag. Wow. I couldn't!

Then, I drew a big web for their spiders to play on. They were so thrilled, pretending my fingers were worms, flies, dragonflies etc, getting stuck on the web so their spiders could gobble them (my fingers!) up. After that, I wasn't free to play with them so the girl improvised. She started tearing pieces of papers of the magazines as insects. When I finally got back to them, the whole floor was full of tiny pieces of papers! Gosh!

We also sang the song "Incy wincy spider" and they made their spiders act accordingly to the song. Ha.

Up the 'spout'!

Sail

Previously, they did rowboats for their project, so I thought it'd be good to introduce to them another kind of boats - sailboat. First, we read a few books with sailboats as the subjects. They particularly loved "Sail away, little boat" by Janet Buell.

Mandy still remembered how to get rowboats moving in the water. She told me we had to use oars. 'What about sailboats?' I asked, 'How do they move?' I told them that when the wind blows on the sail, the boat will move.

Mandy asked me how we make the boats turn. "We steer the sailboats by changing the direction of the sail. If we want the boat to stop, we roll up the sail." I asked them to recall the cartoon 'Up' which they've watched umpteen times. The house has 'sails' too! And Uncle Carl steered the house too. The girl said she understood. The boy had long gone somewhere else. Ha.

They cut their own sails out of cardboard. Barry needed a lot of help. I tried my best to let him think he did everything himself. Ha. They stuck on the sails onto a disposable chopstick and I stuck the sail onto a shallow uncovered container.

Then, they experiment with their sailboats on the water. Mandy blew and was excited when her boat started moving! "Can! Can move mama!" she exclaimed. Barry destroyed his within seconds. Ha.

Then it was half an hour of splish splashing fun! They loooooove that.

Sea

I was way too ambitious for this project. The idea is simple. They had to read this book:

It has pictures of all kinds of sea creatures and their names in it. They had to look for a creature with a name starting 's'. Once that's done, we coloured, cut, laminated them. There were soooooooooo many pictures to do, so I had to help colour. Mandy insisted on cutting and I must say, she did quite a good job. Then, I laminated them so that the kids could play have some imaginative play with them.

Before this, they also sponge painted a big sea, which I also laminated. Mandy had lots of fun with this on the floor. She would pretend the seagull was perched on a rock, a salmon would swim by and the seagull would swoop into the water to eat it. Or it was the seal diving in to find fish. Or the swordfish or sailfish poking other fishes with their sharp noses etc.

She's a diehard animal documentary fan (she's concentrated through the whole Planet Earth series, whole Life series, whole Galapagos series, whole Nature's most amazing events series, and some others..) So, she knows her animals names, predators and and prey pretty well.

Now, the sea is on the wall, free for the kids to draw on, using whiteboard markers, or stick on pictures of the creatures.

Mandy's drawings on the 'sea'.

You cannot really see them but she drew fishes in the water. She said she wanted a 'big school of fish'. She also drew a sun (which looks like a rambutan hehe) and a big bird flying in the sky.

And also, one day, she decided to to add some pavements so the seagulls, seals, otters and sealions could rest. I suggested rocks instead. Ha. She cut and stuck all the yellow rocks herself.

These are the creatures.

Can you imagine all the work we did? Especially me? Tedious! At least, they had fun and learnt from the project. The girl remembers all their names. I bet you don't even know which one is sunfish! Ha! And she knows the difference between a sailfish and a swordfish. WOW! (oops, I just realised the sailfish is not in the picture.) She said she learnt that from Planet Earth.

The boy learnt some names too. :p

Slide

Included this because I knew they would love it. I asked them to imagine playing on the slide at the playground. I asked them why they could go down a slide so fast. Why can't we slide down the floor? This was Mandy's answer "Because slide got slope mah!" Although grammatically incorrect, but I was quite pleased. :)

We looked around for things that could make good slides. Settled on this:

Very soon, they were running around the house in a frenzy, looking for objects to go down the slide. They tried toy cars, beads, balls, soft toys etc. Once in a while, I stopped them make them guess which of 2 objects would slide down faster. The squarish brick or the round ball? The light or the heavy ball?

Then, I left them to do my chores. To my alarm, when I turned back to look, the boy was trying to slide down the table. Haha.

I love easy projects like this. :)

Squirrel, string

These are actually filler projects. The kids were sick for 2-3 weeks. And when they're sick, they're the whiniest, clingy-est creatures you've ever seen. I could hardly breathe with them whining and sticking to me 24/7. They couldn't even lift a pencil to do anything.

We did 2 simple projects then.

This is from here.

They totally drop dead on the table before they could finish sticking the squirrel. This is what the girl managed to complete after 2 sessions. She drew a sun and a tree at the background.

We also did string art.You know, dip string in paint and create a picture on paper.

They did this without their usual enthusiasm. Heh.

Sun

Wanted them to learn about sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset. Just the basic cycle. So we watched a few youtube videos. Search for the timelapse ones so you can see the whole process.

After that, they used paper plates to make a sun and a moon. Mandy chose to make a moon, and Barry a sun.

They drew and colored all by themselves! I must say I'm so proud of the boy. He drew a face!!!! Granted, the nose was accidental. He was drawing the mouth but turned out looking like a nose. So I asked him to draw another mouth. Otherwise, he did everything himself, except the sticking of the cellophane. Previously, he wouldn't even be patient enough to fill up the plate with colours.

Way to go Barry!

See what we did with the sun and moon.

Again, if it irks you to not see the whole screen, please watch it on Youtube. Just double click. I think. Hehe.

This was the 4th take. Barry was tired. But Mandy wanted to do it again and again. They were supposed to be behind a sea... or was it mountain? Ah, not important. Did you know Mandy was tiptoeing when I said 'highest at noon'? She told she was trying to go as high as possible. So funny. :)

I probably left out some details in my narration but well, they get the idea. I thought it was cute.

Sweet, sour and salty

I let them taste sugar, salt and vinegar and asked them to describe each taste to me. Then, we tasted tomato sauce and soy sauce. All in tiny amounts of course.

The next day, I engaged their help in making the sweet and sour sauce for my fish dish. Basically, we mixed sauces, sugar and salt together. They tried and gave me suggestions. "Too sweet". "Too salty". And I adjust the mixture accordingly. A very simple project.


Songs:
Incy Wincy Spider, Oh Mr Sun (no chance to do The big ship sails)

Mandy also did this:

I'm trying to get her to recognise english words since she can do it for mandarin. But somehow, it's much more difficult in english. She could tell me S-U-N is 'sun' by using the phonics method. But when she comes across this word again, she won't know it anymore. We have to start sounding all 3 letters again. Sometimes she gets, sometimes she doesn't. For english word recognition, is it more phonics, the look of the words, or the spelling? I suspect it's a little of everything. You cannot deny phonics help, but not for all words. Memorising spelling is quite tough for a 4 year old. Then, what?

I've read about the whole words method but don't really get it. Hehe. Not very smart lah, what to do?

Her teacher says she can read the reader books but when I take apart the words, ie out of the context of the books, she cannot read them. So was she just memorising the content? Or she could recognise the words somewhat but when out of context, she couldn't 'switch on' her word recognition mode?

Just wondering.