交通工具 - 船

This is the final part of our CL homelearning on transportation. Previously, we had done this and this.

To get them interested, we started off with some fun that I knew they love. We had avocado milkshake for snack that day. As I was washing dishes, I saw the avocado skin and an idea struck me! We could use them as boats! Haha.

They were so thrilled! Mandy was beaming with joy and Barry was trying his best to sink the Lego boy, wreck his boat and make the water as dirty as possible. As usual. At least this time, he didn't pour water all over himself and the floor.

We did a collage craft.

Mandy was having a flu when she did this. She couldn't manage to finish the collage for the sea. No wonder too because she was taking such pains to find the perfect blue piece to fit in perfectly. She didn't want to see any white gaps and tried her best not to let the papers overlap. She was particular even about the shade of blue. I know because she was mumbling while sticking "Ok, there's dark blue here already. Here? Have. Stick here then."

OMG, looking at her do a collage can make me want to tear out my hair. But yet, I'm very proud of her. Such patience. A pity she couldn't finish it. I was on the verge of asking her to 'anyhow stick' so that she could finish it. But that would be wrong right?

She did the sea on the left side of the boat. As you can see from the right, I'm not as patient as her.
 
Barry? He did everything (with lots of help) BUT the sea. You would have notice that the sea collage is the bulk of the project. Hah.

They also did this:

Both coloured. On hindsight, marker pens are such a mistake! Should have stuck to colour pencils.

By sticking time, Barry had lost interest. Mandy said the name of each vehicle in chinese before sticking them in the right bubble. She insisted there was no place for the train because trains don't go on roads. So I drew tracks for her.

I also let them stick stickers of vehicles in their sticker books, but only after saying the name of it in chinese correctly. The boy gave up afte a couple of stickers. The girl, after many repetitions, now know the names of the vehicles pretty well! YAY!

She also learnt to recognise a few more chinese words:  车, 飞, 机, 船

My aim was for her to learn more words but I was pretty slack. Oops.

Cute little lions ushering in the new year!

Inspired by Crazymommy, I did lion dance costumes with the kids on friday. In fact, she has so many good CNY craft ideas I want to do much more with the goods. Alas, I'm way behind schedule in spring cleaning. Haha. I think I should target ONE room instead of the whole place. I've lived here for...7 years? Or more? I don't think we've ever managed to get our place spring-cleaned in time. Oops.    

Plus, I haven't bought any new clothes for the kids. Not a single piece. Going to survive on Xmas presents. Ha. And they might wear clothes they wore last year. Oh, not Barry. Don't think he can still fit into them. :p

By the way,  Crazymommy is a sahm with 2 kids (with no help) and she's very talented in crafts and super good at multitasking. I learnt a lot from her. :) So if you need craft ideas, go visit her site. She gives lots of links too.

Here's our version of the costume:

We spent more than an hour on these! It was fun but I didn't realise how exhausted I was. OMG, there was so much to do! Crazymommy, how did you do it?

I wanted to let the kids do as much as they could. So I left the choosing of colours, drawing, cutting, sticking to them. Mandy was competent enough to do all that. Barry was not. I knew he wanted to try so I let him. In the end, he made a huge mess, leaving many tiny pieces of paper all over the floor. Glue on the floor, sticky tape on the floor, shreds of crepe paper....cotton wool... I guess that contributed to my day long headache. (Serious, I had a headache after that that lasted till this morning. Ha)

Mandy did everything herself, except for the sticking of eyes and 'tail'. I'm very proud of her. She was actually tired from her slight cold but she said she liked making the costume so she would continue to do it even though she was tired.She toiled over it for over an hour.

Barry was distracted on the way but managed to be involved more than I expected him to be.

Oh, Mandy decorated her lion's tail. She said it's a tree. "These are the leaves falling down. A lot a lot of leaves. It's winter." She also scoffed at my idea of sticking the lion's mane. "NO. Lion's mane not like that what! They fall down at the sides one what!" before she plucked out the crepe paper I stuck on for demonstration and re-stick it her own way. The result is quite funny, looking like 2 ponytails at the side. But well, it's her masterpiece and she's really pleased with it. That's enough. :)

See them dance! Mandy delegated me to the drums. Hehe.

You can see the very unglam me for a brief moment in the video, juggling the drum and bells. Ha. Tempo a bit out at some points. That's because I was distracted ok. My rhythm sense and tempo is my strong point in music hor. :p

Hope we'll find time to do more CNY crafts. :)

天上飞的交通工具

I've finally completed the 2nd part of our chinese homelearning theme on 交通工具. See here for the first part.

Previously, we did an aeroplane craft. I showed the kids youtube videos on aeroplane and helicopters' lift-offs.We noted the difference. Aeroplanes have to go faster and faster on the runway (跑道) before they can take flight. Helicopters, on the other hand, will have to let its rotor blades spin faster and faster before it can lift off directly from the ground!

So, I asked the kids, does a helicopter need wheels like the aeroplane?

Drew these on the board and let them hold the aeroplane/helicopter following the arrows.

Then, with some instructions, Mandy drew a helicopter.

Stuck on straws to place emphasis on the rotor blades (螺旋翼和尾翼).

I also jumbled up jigsaw pieces of an aeroplane and a helicopter. They pieced the 2 pictures and stuck them on a piece of paper. Mandy did the helicopter, Barry did the aeroplane.

Still on the topic of flying, I made them 'spinning helicopters'. See the video to find out what they are.

Can you see the paper spinning? 

I quote from the science craft book: " The helicopter falls to the ground because of gravity. Instead of dropping straight down like most things do, it spins gently to the ground. As the helicopter falls, each blade hits the air, forcing the air out to one side. This makes the helicopter soin and slows down its fall."

The kids were so thrilled to see them spin. I explained gravity (this part is in english, I don't think they would be even interested in listening to me if I start spouting things like 地心吸引力. Ha.) by telling them I was going to jumo, touch the light and not come down to the floor. They grinned and asked me to give it a try.

After a few failed attempts, they tried too. All of us inevitably came back down. I told them it was gravity at work. Whatever we throw, they will fall to the ground too.

Then I quoted the book and they kind of switched off. Ha.

If you're interested, here's the instructions for Spinning Helicopter.

Have fun!

Art and crafts

Hubby complained, okay reminded me, that I haven't blogged for a while. :p

I'm quite tired of editing pictures of our outings. So I'll put up some pictures of the kids' artwork.

After a very long procrastination, I finally continued our CL homelearning lessons on transportation. (Linette, I'm still too lazy to type in chinese...Heh)

First, I showed them the word cards of 飞 and 机. Focusing on the word 飞, I asked them what flies. Mandy was able to say 鸟 and 飞机. She said helicopter too. I told her I can fly too. "Watch me!" I said while I jumped and flapped my arms. The kids laughed and tried to imitate my failed attempt at flying.

"咦, 我们不能飞啊! 为什么呢?" "啊! 这是手啊! 不是翅膀! 鸟有翅膀吗? 飞机呢? 直升机呢?" Mandy said helicopters' wings are the ones spinning on top. I told her those are rotor blades, 螺旋桨(finally found out what it's called!) They don't look like wings but they help the helicopter fly.

"鸟和飞机都有翅膀. 翅膀让它们飞! 你看! '飞' 字也有翅膀!"

I made detachable 'wings' to let the kids stick to complete the word. I pointed out that the 钩 looks like a tail.

Then we did a simple craft of assembling the body (机身), wings (机翼) and tail  (机尾) of the aeroplane. They also drew suns, birds and sponged painted white clouds over the blue sky.

Mandy's:

She said the plane flew into the clouds.

Barry's:

That cheeky boy painted all over the words. Mandy wanted big clouds, Barry wanted small clouds. Both turned out very nice! :)

The girl drew a watermelon the other day.

I realised she wouldn't draw if I don't teach her. So I drew one watermelon and she followed step by step. She drew and coloured herself nevertheless. I guess I was too insistent on her coming out with drawings by herself and that stressed her greatly. Now she likes drawing more and because I'm there to guide her, she draws with more confidence and interest.

The zigzag lines were difficult. And it was a bit tricky getting her to alternate the dark and light green properly. But what do you know? Her watermelon turned out way nicer than mine! I love it!

Then, I spelt 'watermelon' for her to write. She was so proud of her work!

I think drawing fruits is a wonderful way to get her to learn patterning (lots of fruits have patterns!) and practise her lowercase writing! And it's easy to pique her interest since she loves fruits so much. It's also about the only thing that works with the boy when it comes to drawing. He refused to draw though, crying that he cannot colour properly and gave up. Haiz.

The girl also attended a 2 hour mixed media art class at the CC, with Philson and his cousin last week.

I was apprehensive because besides school, she's never attended anything by herself. I wanted to use this lesson as gauge to see if she was ok with attending outside classes herself and if she was interested.

She loved it!

The first thing she said out of the classroom was "Mama, I come to this school next time? Is this my school?" She said she liked the class and wanted to attend it again. Whoopee!

Here's what she did in class:

A lot of it was the teacher's work, I could tell. And especially since all 3 kids took out almost identical artworks. Ha! Nevertheless, it was still good exposure.

So now, I'm looking out for art classes for her. And swimming classes. And... I've already signed her up for music classes. Ha. Ya ya, I know. Slowly... I'm just saying...

交通工具 - 车

I broke the teaching of transportation into 3 parts - 车, 机 and 船.

车 are the vehicles on land, 机 in the air and 船 on the sea.

Here's what we've done for the first part of the theme.

First, we read a chinese pictorial book on transportation. Told them the difference between 车, 机 and 船. I know not all vehicles on the ground has 车 in the name and not all 船 are on the sea.  (飞船 ie airship goes in the air )But I'm hoping they will remember the names of the vehicles better this way. 

The first vehicle I introduced to them was 火车.

We took 3 storage boxes with wheels and joined them up to form a train. I told them those are the carriages of the train, called 车箱 in mandarin. They have a Dora book with a nice picture of a train going up a mountain, with Dora, Boots and her teacher, each sitting in one carriage. Mandy was very pleased to do the same. They even had one extra carriage for their soft toys!

Going into the tunnel (隧道)

Did I say she's into posing now?

It was pretty tiring pulling them around in that 'train' and repeatedly singing '开火车'. It was my favourite childhood song but the kids don't like it.

They pretended to be passengers getting on and off the train, stopping at stations like the zoo, the beach, and the airport. They also took turns to be the driver (司机) steering the train using a round plate.

I explained why 火车 is named as such. Unlike subway trains (aka our MRT trains), 火车 runs on burning coal. The coal gets very hot and gives out smoke, much like fire burning. I hope my understanding is correct.

Then I told them 脚踏车 has its name because we use our legs (脚) to pedal (踏) in order for the bicycle to move. 汽车 runs on 汽油.

Next, we did bus. 巴士 when said very fast, sounds like bus!

We made buses out of tissue boxes and cardboard. Mandy cut out the cardboard wheels herself (not bad!). The kids stuck on the wheels. I suggested adding windows with pictures of passengers, gave them a stack of leftover coloured papers from previous projects, and encourage them to 'dress up' their bus! I did give a few suggestions though.

Here's what Mandy did, with no physical help from me at all.

Notice the bus doors and the driver? Oh, I wrote the chinese words for her to stick, of course. All her passengers look alike. I commented that some of them look like Bert from Sesame Street, because of their hair. Cute.

She told me she wanted to leave some windows blank because not all seats are filled, but went on to draw in all the windows anyway. She also told me, with a smile on her face, that the 2 friends are sitting together. (right red window)

Barry's bus is... destroyed. As usual. Haha. Managed to get one picture. He needed quite a bit of help.

I was so hoping he would draw a face again, like last time. But he's back to doodling. Ha.

Did a worksheet with the girl.

The bicycle and bus were colored by her.

I think this is a good worksheet. Buay paiseh, hehe. She learnt the names of the vehicles and how the words look like, how many wheels they have, chinese word recognition (the numbers) and practised writing the numbers.

We also played a game using these:

I ask questions like (in mandarin) "See who can find the bus first!" and "How many cars are there?". For the latter, she had to grab the correct word (that represents the number) before I do. I made it into a competition. She gets pretty competitive, so I've found out that's one of the ways she learns well. Barry, on the other hand, totally couldn't be bothered. All the while, he lied on the bed and stoned. Haha.

We learnt 3 songs.

It's totally not practical doing up elaborate song sheets on vanguard so I just do simple ones on A4. They're kept in a file and once in a while, I take it out to sing with the kids. They love 造飞机.

Did one fill-in-the-blanks with the girl.

She doesn't know all the words so I let her refer to the original lyrics for this. In this way, she learns.

Now, I'm racking my brains on how to teach aeroplane and helicopter.

By the way, now during storytime, Mandy tells me "妈妈, 我要读书." When we were reading one night, she pointed out that I had mistaken a child for the mother, "不是, 这个是孩子!". She's saying much more mandarin her vocabulary has improved a lot too!

Making progress. :)