Ting Ting rainbow cake

Ting Ting made this last night with the mega blocks. According to her, it is a rainbow cake! 

Home teaching updates

Its been a while since I update about Ting Ting home teaching. I have been very busy recently about the happenings at home and many other things. Therefore its been a long time I had my structured classroom sessions with my gal. So now, as things seems to be settled, I can concentrate in my home teaching again. 

Today I happened to chance upon some preschool workbooks which are what I have in mind to go through with my gal. Initially I was thinking to do up the worksheets by myself but that would be very time consuming. These workbooks I come across are practice workbooks about alphabets, phonetics, numbers and simple math and calculation. I felt they are very simple to understand and down to earth too. So I bought 8 books at $20. Not exactly dirt cheap but save me the time and effort to do it myself. 

Currently my gal is attending a playgroup of 2 hrs daily on weekdays. What I like about the playgroup is its structured learning approach. For instance, they will focus one week on teaching colours and another week on shapes and so on. Although my gal already know all these (colours, shapes, numbers, weather, alphabets A to Z), but the focus approach of teaching helps to reinforce her understanding which I felt is very good in building a solid foundation for her as she progress. 

However, I felt that it is time to expose her to more themes while she is having her foundation to be reinforce in the playgroup. I hope when she goes to nursery 2 and kindergarten, it will be easier for her to pick up and hence reducing the need for supplementary lessons so she can have more time to play and have fun. 

I observed that my gal has no problem in learning language particularly english. However, she is quite slow in numbers and not conversant in mandarin yet. 

These are the areas I need to buck up with her. Ironically, maths and Chinese subjects are my forte especially Chinese and I always thrive in my grades for subjects relating to numbers previously. Anyway, I decided to take things one at a time. 

My strategy is as follows: 

1) English

Focus on building her foundation in english first. Particularly phonetics, word recognition and writing. 

2) Numbers and Math

- Exposing her to 1-50 numbers and gradually to 100. 

- numbers recogition and understanding,

- practice writing of numbers

- simple addition and subtraction. 

3) Chinese language

- Work on her chinese words pronounication, 

- source for easy to understand mandarin workbooks for practice writing simple chinese characters (so far I have not come across such workbooks yet. The ones I saw are quite complex for her age).

- words recognition and understanding

- source for interesting mandarin teaching videos

- borrow more chinese books for her daily reading

Workbooks new collections. 

Although some workbooks are labelled for K1 but after flipping through the contents, it seems suitable for her age too. Anyway I just try out and evaluate the results as we progress. 

Ting Ting development @ 37 months

At 37 months, she can now memorize all the planets' name in the solar system and the sequence of the planets from the sun. Her hobby now is to read books about planets and kept asking to watch the planets in the solar system videos. It is now a goodbye to her Peppa Pig and Dora the explorer.

She got an intense interest in astronomy especially planets. She can even tells me which planets have rings around it correctly and some features of the different planets. For instance, she will tell me there are lots of craters on Mercury and very hot because it is the nearest to the sun. She will also tells me that there are storms on Neptune.

Previously her favourite planet was Saturn and her reason was "Because there are rings around it!". Now she tells me that her favourite planet is Pluto. When I asked her why but she couldn't answer me (I guess it could be due to the "Heart Shape" landscape on Pluto?). Even though officially Pluto had been "demoted" to be a dwarf planet because it couldn't meet the so called "planet requirements", but I always counted Pluto as the ninth planet. Also the recent New Horizon space probe mission had revealed Pluto to be a fascinating world which is totally out of expectations. I felt that it is important for her to know about Pluto as part of the solar system so I just shared with her how Pluto looks like and why it was not classified as a planet now anymore. She was intrigued with Pluto and it now become her favourite planet!

Last night when we were cycling in the park, she was able to recognise the bright, non-blinking star-like object in the night sky as Jupiter. I used the Skyview app to check if that was really Jupiter and true enough it was! Maybe it was a coincident but Jupiter was the planet which started off her interest in astronomy.

Her interest in astronomy really surprised me especially how much she learnt within a short period of time. All these are very basic and simple knowledge but for a toddler who barely passed 3 years old, it is very commendable to me.

I hope her interest in astronomy will continue. I am open to her studying astronomy in the future if she has a passion in it even though this subject may not be offered in Singapore currently.

To keep up with her interest, I will try to borrow more books on astronomy for children and perhaps bring her to the science centre observatory in one of the Friday night to see the stars too.