It’s starting to feel a bit more Christmasy around our home. I finally got down to planning a countdown for Sophie to help her understand the meaning of Christmas! Instead of a 24 days Advent calendar, I have the improvised quick fix one - 8 days! Hahaha! Better than nothing!

Day 1
We started Day 1 yesterday by fixing up our Christmas tree! Ok not we, just James and Sophie, I was busy taking pictures! Finally! Just 1 more week to Christmas! With all the boxes lying around, we had to dig out a space to put up the tree. One of our family traditions (er ok, we only have 1 so far… hiak!) is to buy a new Christmas ornament every year. We got this in Brisbane for this year.

Day 2
Today is Day 2. We got down to making Christmas cards, somewhat. All my grand plans of making different types of cards with Sophie turned into one big fingerpainting exercise. Oh wells!

 Prints for Christmas

The other thing we did was to set up a Nativity scene……….. er……… with our multi purpose Happyland Farm set! Wah hahahaha…. the Farmer is now Joseph and his wife is Mary. Pretty convenient huh? I handmade (Hahaha!) a star using origami paper and it really looks like a nativity scene. My original plan was to make the scene from scratch. Ya right. Maybe next year if I start now. But I love it. It sits next to the tree and it served as an excellent teaching tool for Sophie to learn about Christmas. She tried to put baby Jesus to bed.

Nativity scene next to Christmas tree

And finally, we try to read different versions of a Christmas story to Sophie every night - traditional, modern interpretations, the bible itself etc. Oh yes, and we’ve been playing Christmas songs all day. I bought a Veggie Tales Christmas soundtrack off iTunes yesterday - it’s ok, quite funny! She’s now able to sing Jingle Bells and Away in the Manger, sometimes she mixes up the lyrics from the different stanzas but it’s super nice to hear her sing them!

Join us for the countdown….

We watched this last Sat.

I’m not quite sure what it really was but somehow I found that last year’s was much better. Generally this year, the sound was very soft and couldn’t capture the attention of the kids sufficiently and as a result, the kids were rather noisy and distracted. At certain points I couldn’t hear the conductor.

And I was waiting for Uncle Peter the conductor to tell a story but they didn’t this year. Last year he told a story and the music followed the movements of the story.

Nonetheless, we enjoyed the entire process very much. Just the opportunity to sit in the concert hall to listen to the SSO and not having to be quiet is a good thing.

After listening to Super Strong God (Hillsongs for kids) and Barney (got this on iTunes) on hyper mode, I was really getting tired of kids songs. I mean I love the songs but listening to it almost everyday can be really too much.

SOOOOOOOO I went around to look for less upbeat songs for children and lo and behold I found my favorite genre - FOLK, bit indish. LOVELY! I like Jazz but not that much either. I sourced 3 different singers, very similar styles singing happy happy tunes of childhood - Frances England, Lisa Loeb (I used to like her so much!) and Elizabeth Mitchell. So I bought 3 cds from itunes store - Fascinating Creatures by Frances England, Catch the Moon by Lisa Loeb and You are my Sunshine by Elizabeth Mitchell. They only cost about US$9.99 each.

Best of all? Sophie LOVES IT! What a breath of fresh air! Now my next quest is to find Christian songs for kids in the same genre. Tall order tho. If you know any, pls pls let me know…

1. Madeline
Sophie loves Madeline (er… as a result of my influence of course. :)). She’s been reading Madeline books and watching the cartoon (from iTunes). We’ve got Madeline’s Rescue (Borders) and Madeline’s Christmas (Books Actually). Madeline is like a girl hero - she’s the smart one that always saves everyone! And of course she’s french. I love hearing her speak.

2. The Rhyme Bible Storybook
This is a must read every night. We’ve been reading it so much to Soph that she is now choosing which ones she likes to read again. Her fav stories are Zacchaeus who climbed up the tree to see Jesus, Jesus told the disciples to throw the nets into the sea and they had a big catch, Noah and the boat. We like this coz every story rhymes! Very cool to read. We got this from Angie’s online bookstore.

3. Ready, Set, Brush
James’ auntie got this from Borders for Sophie for her birthday. It’s REALLY cool - it’s a Sesame St book that is a pop up book, kinda "interactive" where you can brush the character’s teeth etc. It was a great book to encourage Sophie to brush her teeth.

ML n I organised a little Christmas party at our church mums grp yesterday.

The turn out was so good! We had more than 10 mums and more than 20 kids from 7 mths to 8 years old running around. We set up three tables - 1 for craft, 1 for cookie decorating and 1 for the food and drinks. After singing some carols, everyone took turns for craft and doing the cookies coz we didn’t have space for all.

Last year, we did the same activities but I had to do almost everything for Sophie but this year, she did both activities almost on her own. Cool beans!

Sophie REALLY enjoyed decorating her "gingerbread" man, with the help of Auntie SA n ML coz I was busy manning the craft table. All the kids were eating their chocolate chips, sprinkles and I caught Sophie eating off the icing that fell off even before they finished the decorations on the cookies. Sophie decorated three cookies and finished eating them all!

At the craft table, we made Christmas trees as Christmas tree decorations using foam. Some turned out very pretty but I was too busy, forgot to take pictures!

We went to watch The Very Hungry Caterpillar & Other Eric Carle Favourites by the Mermaid Theatre from Nova Scotia, Canada (check this link for the video). It was staged at Victoria Theatre.

Eric Carle is one of Sophie’s fav artist and author so she had no problems settling in. She was nicely propped up on two booster cushions and sat on her own throughout the show. The puppeteers were REALLY good. The show was almost an hr long, not sure I was so captivated I didn’t really know what time it was when it ended. They showed The Little Cloud, The Mixed Up Chameleon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. All of which Sophie has read except the first one.

I really enjoy watching these shows where kids are the main audience because they are SO spontaneous! It gets really noisy thru the show when they start shouting out the names of the animals but so fun!

Since we’re on the topic of rainbows, I found instructions on how to make rainbows!!!!!!!! And it so happened that the afternoon sun was nice and strong. I was really impressed that it actually worked and showed it to Sophie but she was more interested in her ride on car. Oh wells!

Can you see the rainbow?

Thanks Nyet! It was finally time to pull out this trick, she loves it! It kept her occupied for a while but the novelty is slowly wearing out…. hahaha…

Some time ago I mentioned that Wednesdays are Chinese Days at our home.

We used to just read books and listen to CDs and attempt to speak (argh!). But since I bought a set of flash cards, I’m planning to revolve the activities around the topics from the set of flash cards (Tots Can Read - in English and Mandarin). I really like this set coz it’s big and comes in booklets too (blind can see kinda big, which means I can’t lose them!), it’s got the words and pictures separated so it helps the kiddos to recognise the words, and it comes with Hanyu Pinyin. Bit costly but can look around for second hands. The English set is a bit sad tho - instead of saying Older Brother, Younger Sister, it reads Big Brother, Little Sister. Argh. Oh wells.

This week we did Jia Ting (Family) and Shen Ti (Body).

Using paper plates and coloured foam from Popular, I cut out face parts for Soph to stick on three faces - Dad, Mum and Baby. Ok… the faces are not very different but….. so funny lah… hee… I had fun cutting out the parts the night before. It really helped to emphasize the names of the facial parts coz I had to keep repeating for her to pick up the right ones to stick on.

After she was done with the faces (which she totally enjoyed!), I did the rest of it while she did something else. I made a house to stick the faces on and stuck on the words.

Here’s the end result! (Oh… Ignore the little play dough on the side, I didn’t even realise it was there when I took the picture until blogging! Soph must have added that in later! Hahah… )

I was inspired by June’s post on toys and books for DN and decided to share what Sophie’s been playing with recently. She’s very into play right now.

There are two sets of toys that she plays with EVERYDAY since we’ve returned.

1. Early Learning Center Goosefeather Farm set

We got this for her for her birthday. I looooooooooove ELC toys…… the colours, the assortment, the size etc……. and of course my favorite part is that they pull their toys apart for the kids to play with at the stores! For FREE!

Anyways….. Sophie loves the farm. She didn’t at first but she is enjoying it more and more. She’ll line the animals in a row, press the buttons with the animal sounds, she’ll make the farmer move around in his tractor with animals etc…….. I think it makes more sense to her since she’s been on a farm. And she even put the mummy sheep, daddy sheep and baby sheep together and said "That’s a family!" - ok i’ve no idea how she figured it out but she did! Super funny!

2. Tea set

I have an open concept kitchen - which means baby danger!!! All my crockery are at toddler level on open shelves!!!!! Eeks…….. No one told me that babies actually move around eventually! Ok…………… but I’m seriously thankful that Sophie wasn’t a great mover.

When she finally did move, the only thing that she kept reaching for was the TEA SET! I’m not sure why. I’ve got a pretty tea cup and saucer set in pretty colours and a tea pot and she loves touching and pulling them out. Only problem, they are porcelain!!!!! Yeeeks!!!!! I would tell her time and time again not to do that.

Finally Gin got her her very own tea set (plastic hiak!) for her birthday! It even comes with a tray to bring the tea around. SHE ADORES IT!!!!!!!! Er…… so everyday I’m served tea and cake. So cute lah…….

Together with her baby doll, I guess she’s pretty much set to be a little "grown up" girl. Everyday she’s been "going to the market", "cooking", "serving tea", "putting the baby to bed", etc…

Guess what????? We found a RC (Residential Commitee) ran vegetable patch at our estate! How cool is that when we have been longing for more green since we got back?

It’s not exactly a patch anymore. It used to be a patch where some old guys hung around and grow plants but it’s grown! It’s about the size of a playground. There is now an enclosure and the residents can apply for an area to grow whatever they like!

It was such a treat for Sophie and I. We met Uncle Yip who showed us around. He even carried Sophie to see the taller plants. She was thrilled to see baby pumpkins, lady’s fingers, chillies, bittergourds and so much more. Apparently they are going to make a little fish pond too for the kids to catch fish and play.

Woo hoo! Rural right at my doorstep.

I’ve been wanting to introduce Sophie to the alphabets, numbers and colours in a coherent manner for a while now. But I’m so haphazard that I’ll start something and forget about it the next week.

Recently I chanced upon the Letter of the Week curriculum via the Singapore Homeschooling yahoo group and thought I’d try it.

I like it because it has a systematic curriculum for young kids from babies to kindy level. The babies curriculum even introduces a bible verse each week. See… it’s all planned out and idiot proof to follow. It’s got the basics and the haphazard mum me can improvise as we go along. We use Step One - The Preparatory Curriculum.

Every week it introduces

- a new theme e.g this week’s Kitten but I changed it to Cat (oh wells, I wrote cat instead of kitten on the paper so decided to just go with cat. Ha!), and a new vocabulary word (Claws - the word is normally related to the theme),
- a new letter e.g "C",
- a new shape/colour e.g the shape "Diamond",
- a new number e.g. the number "3" and
- a new nursery rhyme.

One thing for each day of the week. With each, there are links to different ideas how to execute the theme/category. I like that coz we can spend a few minutes a day just doing one thing and if we have more time, we can do more things. Very helpful for working mums and mums who have a few kids and of course, "always finding the easy way out" mums like me.

At the end of each day, we’ll refer to the Learning Poster and "show off" to Daddy what we learnt that day before going to bed.

This will go on for 26 weeks. We’ve only done 3 weeks and so far so good. I’m not sure how much of it Sophie is absorbing on the go but she knows that milk comes from cows and baby cows are called calf (The first week’s theme was Cows). That’s not too bad ah? She’s still quite gabra (blur) about the letters and colours but I’m not so worried about that. I figured she’ll eventually get it. Er… hopefully I’ll last 26 weeks.