shower time

It had always been a chore to convince Bryan to go take a shower, especially on a cold winter day. Today, I just decided to let him shower himself! He had so much fun that he even requested to shower again the next day. At the end of the day, Bryan was grinning with pride as he told his grandparents how he showered himself, without Mommy's help.


Yes, and all this Mommy had to do was to sit by the shower area and watch that he's safe.

Easy job, right?

numbers and colours?

The other day, my mom and I were lamenting at how slow Kristin's skills were developing as compared with Bryan's.

By 24 months, Bryan could do rote counting, name his colours accurately and recognise many letters in the alphabet. By the time he was in Germany at about 27 months, he could always sit still through DVDs, or at least dance along - which by the way to me shows that he understood what he watched. He could also be still when someone read him a story. At about 29 months, he was telling stories to his baby sister.

Now Kristin is almost 29 months old. And my mom and I were just saying how little she knew about the colours, numbers and letters. And then during dinner, my mom decided to go through some colours with Kristin. Guess what discoveries we made?

Kristin's been having us on all this while thinking that she didn't know a thing about colours. Actually, she's been fooling with us whenever she's shown blue, she'd say green, or pink and say yellow. So it's quite true now that she sees colours and identifies them. So when she cried out, "Look, Mommy, pink flowers! Purple flowers!", she really meant them. At that time, she was about 20 months old out shopping groceries with me. I remembered a German lady was utterly impressed and I told her it was a fluke coz she didn't always get it right. Goodness... how I brushed Kristin aside.


Yesterday during lunch, Kristin also showed me that she recognised numbers on the placemats, mainly the numerals 4 and 8.


So all this while when her teacher in the preschool commented that Kristin knew her numbers, colours, and letters, it's all true.


I think I need to applaud her achievement a bit more to motivate her. She certainly doesn't get as much attnetion as Bryan did when he was almost 29 months old.

word of the week...

I-I-C-P-T-N.

"Look, Mommy. It's Aye, Aye, Captain! I heard it on Spongebob."

That was Bryan playing with toothpicks at the dinner table. It's funny how he left out all the vowels. But he did get the consonants right.

I'm very pleased with his progress in school. A year ago, he would not be ready for some spontaneous toothpick spelling like this.

I'm also very happy with the fact that when he's asked what the letter is, he'll say the letter's name. And when he's asked how the word is being read, he will sound out the word phonetically.

But right now, I'm sure he's rising to the challenge of spelling bee. Actually, he was already spelling words younger. Words that are of significance to him, e.g. zoo! I think he was a couple months short of 3 then.

some of her favourite songs...

both at home and in school:



I particularly like the part where she would place her hands slightly behind her bottoms, and then lean backwards to support herself with her head pointing towards the ceiling and her mouth wide open! Hahaha...

happy holidays!

It's Christmas party in Kristin's class this morning. This was an encore from all parents because the kids simply did so well!

new bake wares...

Earlier this month there was a fund-raising event in the kids' preschool: Kitchen wares on auction.
Unwittingly, I placed bids on 6 different baskets. See, I always overspend, don't I?

Thank goodness that I only managed to get 3 baskets. And for 57 Euros, I have bake wares now that will last me a life time. And yes, I did promise my sponsor aka family's CFO aka my dearest husband that I would keep the oven running the whole winter, baking an awful lot, enough to keep us all warm and toasty in the apartment.

Check out these new additions to my kitchen:

wait a minute...

Both my kids are never interested in food.

So what do we do at home? We feed the children. Actually, we feed them too when they're out dining with us.



When my mom was feeding Kristin last night (btw, hurrah! My parents are here and they are a great help!), Kristin told her to wait a minute.

She was fumbling her toy, which was essential at dinner table to distract her to open her mouth so that we can just shove food in.



Yeah... spoon-feeding is what we do. We certainly do make sure that our children won't starve. You should have seen the many recent cases of children being neglected and starved to death in this country, yes, even in this part of the world. If only my kids knew when Mommy talked about Lea-Sophie of Schwerin, she wasn't making up stories.



Wait a minute, girl. It's time you eat!

skipping the night...

We've been through all those:

Skipping naps, skipping meals, skipping baths etc...

But tonight, it's "skipping the night"! Why?



Bryan: When's Daddy gonna be home?

Mommy: Daddy's not coming home tonight. He's gotta work.

Bryan: You mean, he's skipping the night?

Mommy: No. I mean he's gonna stay in a hotel tonight because it's just too far for him to come home and sleep.



Funny expressions aside, Bryan's quite right after all, in a way. Daddy is "skipping the night". Poor Alan, I think he's still working away in his hotel room. Probably pulling an all nighter, again.

our cutie pies...

Hey all!

This is an update of our cutie pies. Picture taken in October.
We just received our copies today.

Aren't they both looking gorgeous? :)

c'mon, darling...

This is my favourite phrase. I hurry my children through the whole day with "c'mon darling, let's go!"

And this afternoon when Kristin woke up from her nap, she told her mommy, "C'mon, darling. Let's go!"

it's a cow!

Mommy: What animal goes "moo"?
Kristin: It's a cow. And you get milk too!
Mommy: Wow!

I think the sound animals make is just too simple for my little girl now. I shall try asking her what one can get from an animal or perhaps naming the youngs of animals.

word of the week...

Bryan: N-O- No, V-M - Vem, B-R - Ber. There, mom, NOVEMBER!
Mommy: ????? LOL

Today's Novmbr the 27th!

KAPUTT!

I was just thinking of the funny words my kids use to express something is out of working condition.

The top favourite for Kristin is "kaputt". It is German, but can also be found in the English dictionary. She moved on very quickly from "broken" to "kaputt" and probably thinks that this is her favourite word now when something is out of order.

Bryan likes to say, "Look. My ship is wrecked." Or, "look Mom, Meimei ruined my train!" And I constantly hear him scream, "Don't wreck this! Don't ruin that!" whenever the two are playing together. Yeah, you can almost sense his frustration coz Kristin is definitely not a very nice little sister now. She's going through the phase where she destroys all things! O help! Kaputt! Alles kaputt!

it's paying off...

Early February this year, I was eager to teach Bryan some sight words. Timing wasn't really perfect. He was reading a little and then became lazy to practise anything at all.

I always subscribe to the belief that creating a learning rich environment will enable a person to learn subconsciously. This has always been so when I sprinkled important lines all over my classroom when I was teaching German, especially near the main entrance/exit. You see, students go through them so many times a day. It would not be long that they would put the foreign sounds to the foreign words.

Anyway, I thought I could do the same with my kids too. All my passive learning aids were up in the hope that my kids would absorb something without me actively teaching them, e.g. the alphabet wall frieze, the posters, the sight word charts etc. After 9 months, I think it's paying off:

Bryan was using the alphabet wall frieze yesterday to spell his name and his friends' names yesterday.

Then he surprised me when he read out the whole of the "Where" and "my" sight word chart!

He couldn't have remembered from his memory coz:

1) It was about 9 months ago that I even uttered those sounds to him.

2) He was correcting himself as he read. The first two questions begin with "Where is", while the next three are "Where are". When he was at question no. 3, he was reading "Where is" initially and then self-corrected to "Er, no, it's Where are". And when it came to differentiating socks from shoes, I begin to believe that he's making connections with the little phonics that he learnt from Ms Julie's class last year. The words "shoes" was initially read with "s" sound. And then he self-corrected again when he saw the aitch and went "sh-oes".

He's definitely making the connections. How exactly, I don't really know. This reminds very much of the"litte black box" aka the Language Acquisition Device as proposed by Chomsky.

Till now I still haven't figured out how to teach him phonics, blending sounds. I tried using onsets/rimes, but he still has a long way to go when it comes to segmenting words into syllables. Honestly, I don't have the diligence to do work on something with him systematically every day.

But I'm definitely pleased that he's reading without any active effort of teaching on my part!

nocturnal vs diurnal...

I'm really pleased with what Ms Judi does in her class. It took me many years to learn about the terms nocturnal and diurnal, and now my 4 year-old son is just rattling off what nocturnal and diurnal animals are.

I wish I could do more with the kids, e.g. reading with them. Even that I hardly find energy to keep up.