Fun with Beads

I bought a new game for Jia during my trip to Bandung recently.  It is a set of beads with pegboards and templates.  

It was bought with the intention to keep Jia occupied throughout her trip in Bandung as Bandung does not have many fun activities for kids.  At the end, I find it to be an interesting and useful toy for her as it helps to improve motor skill as well as giving the sense of achievement when she got the shapes done by filling in bead by bead onto the pegboard.

Here's what it looks like inside the box.  It consists of a few packs of beads with different colors, a few templates, and two pegboards. 

This is how it looks like after it is harden by ironing under mild heat for around two minutes.  This is the fun part that excites Jia a lot as she gets to hold and feel the end result which is the harden beads that are joined together.  The harden beads can then be used as decoration by sticking onto wall, or just bringing it around.

Artistic Works

Wen Jia has developed her art skills substantially over the last few weeks.
She used to have the fear of picking up a pencil and start drawing something, most probably due to lack of the concept of shapes and dimensions. But who cares? We didn't even bother to send her for a "training" just for that. No, I don't think she need that. And i know what she needs. She just need more time from both her parents to encourage and nurture her as she gets along.
We observed and noticed that she felt excited when seeing her cousins did painting work with water color. There she goes, we bought a box of Buncho water color for her and did her first ever drawing and painting with her. I was proud to see her producing her first painting with very minimum help from us.

Besides, her coloring skill has improved so much and she has indeed exhibited a fair bit of creativity when comes to choosing her own color. Below coloring work with color pencils has seen her using colors of her choice without even following the pictures on the upper side which are pre-printed as a guide.

She has also started some paper art as part of her class work in Purity Learning session that she joins twice monthly.
This one is a paper art of a dinosaur that was created in recent class.

Overall, art works train her patience and concentration which is the key to learning.

A fruitful year for Wen Jia

This year marks the 3rd year since Wen Jia was born. She has been doing wonderfully in terms of physical and intelligence growth.
Physically she is a healthy, tall girl with improved physical strength - a natural process of growth.  Like most of the grown up kids, she doesn't like to eat vege.  We often mixed meat or fish with finely cut vege so that she could  get a better combination of nutrients as much as possible.
She likes most types of food especially oranges, and grapes.  Her taste on fruits has changed a lot. Her old time favourites such as banana, papaya, and apple have now become part of the list of food that she will avoid.  Well, I forgot to mention that she likes pineapple - the one cooked together with pork rib, or even in pineapple fried rice. 
In terms of learning and games, she has started to pick up interest in puzzle. We started with some simple puzzles (the 12 pieces one) and slowly moved to 18 pieces and 24 pieces.  She still need some guidance when come to the more complex one but overall it was a good start.  My friend in Singapore was right, always start with some character that she likes the most and she will slowly build interest in whichever games associate to those characters.  In Wen Jia's case, she likes the Mickey & Minnie, and also the Disney Princess puzzles the most.
On flash card learning, it has been reduced significantly. I have started to show more on the computer than the hand-made ones.  Also, she has started to explore more online learning such as the ones in sesame street, Nick Jr, etc.  The important part is, I selected the games for her to suit her age and development. 
She started rhythmic gymnastics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythmic_gymnastics) class early this year.  Possibly due to her yong age, the results have not been significant. Anyway, as our objective wasn't for her to be a gymnast or the sort, it is fine for her to play and have fun in the class once a week. 
She joined a mandarin word card lesson under a "Teacher Yap's" program.  It has been very good that she managed to pick up 20 over charcters over a period of 1 month but she has lost interest in the class soon after her 3rd month.  Our observation (having personally sit in the centre to wait for Wen Jia to finish her class) was that the teaching quality has deteriorated so much so until her actual time spent in the lesson was merely 20 minutes out of 1.5 hours in the centre.  We stopped the lesson for a while and would decide in next year if she should continue. 
I started Hooked on Phonics program with her since early this year after been introduced to this material by a friend in Singapore.  She has just completed Pre-K Level 1.  A bit slow but I think it was partly my fault for not been able to spend more time more frequently with her on the lesson.  Overall it was a fun program to follow, and I took it as an oppotunity to foster bonding with my girl.
Wen Jia will be in Pre-Kindy when the school opens next year.  Seriously we will have to observe more on her progress and most importantly to understand more about what is going on in the kindergarten.  It is really not about how good she can cope with her homework but it is very much on how well she enjoys a new learning milestone.

小妮子爱说话

嘉已快步入两岁半了。近来在语言技巧方面很明显地提升了很多。
小妮子什么都会拿来问。见到剪草工人就问”what doing?" 意即 “what is he doing?"。看到报纸上足球员跌地的痛苦表情，劈口就问 ”what happened uncle?"。 女儿开始掌握简单句子了。
到这年龄，她对性别年龄也有了基本认识了。电视或书刊上男女老幼的图片画面她都能一一辨别 auntie, uncle, "kor kor", "jie jie", 妹妹， 弟弟 之分。
想在的嘉嘉，活像个”问题女生“。”十万个为什么“ 那种。任何时候任何事都会问一通。她的口头禅似乎变成了 ”what? why? 等等。
我知道这是她学习的另一里程碑。开始在提问中获得新的知识及技巧。现在要做的是认真聆听，有问必答。

Wen Jia's quitting pacifier

How to get a child to quit using a pacifier?
These are the suggestions posted on wikihow (http://www.wikihow.com/Get-a-Child-to-Quit-Using-a-Pacifier)

# Set up a rewards program. Give your child a star each day they go without, and after they have (x) number of stars consistently, they can get a treat, like a Popsicle, or even going to the movies.
# Simply take it away. This will upset the child for a few days, and they may dislike you for about a week. But after that, they won't remember. And you can have a huge sigh of relief because you don't have to deal with it anymore. This is most effective for younger children, who can't understand a reward system like a 3-5 year-old could.
# Use an older child as an example. Even a cartoon character, like Dora the Explorer would work. You just have to say, "You don't see your cousin Sam with a Binky, do you? That's because he's a big boy. And you want to be a big boy don't you?" often works. Using a model can help them begin understanding comparisons earlier then say, preschool.
# Inform the child that there are other children that need Binky's that are just being born. Send him out to hang them on a tree,or to hide them throughout the house, so that the Binky fairy can pick them up. Keep a close watch to see where he hid them, and then get them that night. Leave a small gift, something cheap and plastic but that the child will like, in each child's place.

It is too young for Wen Jia to understand rewards program so the first suggestion won't work. We used a combination of suggestion 2 and a bit of tricks to help her to quit pacifier. First, we took it away while on our vacation to Singapore. We stayed in a friend's house so we created a trick (as suggested by our friend in Singapore) that "uncle" had threw the pacifier away. In exchanged, my friend bought her a toy cake which she likes so much to make her believe that "uncle" had exhanged the pacifier with a toy that she likes.

Though she cried a few nights asking for the pacifier, but we managed to calm her down by telling her the "uncle" story again and again.
But, the story didn't end here, when she was back in KL, she requested for pacifier again. Probably she thought that the "restriction" was only for as long as she was in Singapore. Siew Wei has had some tough time at night calming her down and rocking her to sleep. We started to believe that pacifier did miraculously caused addiction to my girl that she felt unsecure and uneasy without it. Until today, she still asks for pacifier although less frequent now.
Well, for Wen Jia, it takes a lot of persistency and patience for us to stop her from using pacifier. We nearly gave up but we knew that the golden rule is "never give up or else it will take double the effort now to make her quit". I think we are 70% there as she is getting more and more comfortable without pacifier.

Puzzles

2 years old being a new milestone for Wen Jia. She has started showing interest in things that she didn't ever bother to take a second look on. One such example is her interest in puzzles.
I bought a simple set of puzzles with a maximum of 8 building blocks each. Each with farm and pet animals such as dog, cat, duck, cow that Jia Jia is exposed to from various sources such as educational VCD, story books, and flash cards.
She showed interest after a few rounds of playing. Most importantly, either Siew Wei or myself has to accompany her in solving the puzzles. We were by her side to show encouragement as well as praise her when necessary for her "achievement". With that, she built her interest in these puzzles and has since volunteering to play them every now and then.
It is crucial to start with simple puzzles so not to discourage the kids. Even adults find it hard sometimes to solve moderate to difficult puzzles so why burdening our children to do the same!
I am happy with what Jia has achieved and will continue to add into her collection some new puzzles in future.

第一首歌

最近雯嘉开始哼哼学唱歌了。第一首学会哼的歌竟是我在她还在妈妈肚里常为她哼的“自己跌倒自己爬“。
他也爱其他如“妈妈好“ 的歌，但学起来竟没有“自己跌倒自己爬“ 般得心应手。
我不得不认为那是所谓的“胎教”的功效。
记得雯嘉刚出世的头几天，爱哭闹得很。我也常用这首歌来哄她。总觉得这首歌特别能安抚她，听了一会儿哭闹也缓和下来。我想这该是因为在胎里常听这首歌的缘故吧。
小孩的吸收能力是惊人的，我不得不相这一点。唱歌也好，学说话也好，小瓜总会为我带来惊喜。她似乎不需要刻意去灌输，其实分分钟都在学习。所以父母们，千万要留意你们的举止及言行。你的一举一动，都有可能影响着子女将来的人格朔造。

Wen Jia went to school again

This Wednesday, Wen Jia went back to the kindergarten that she used to study for 1 month in Feb.
The reason she quit the previous attemp was because she was too attached to mum that she couldn't even see her mum went out of sight.
We realised that that wasn't an ideal time for schooling yet for Wen Jia as she was not ready.
Over the last few weeks, we noticed that she has made great improvement in wanting to mix around with other kids. She has been doing OK when left alone with my neighbour's kids. That implied she was then more ready than before in making herself detached from mum, at least for a few hours.
On her first day of schooling, we left the "kakak" with her. She was a bit shy when facing other kids on her first day, but she did not cry. She has been asking for Mummy but was managed to be pacified by toys and activities.
She has gained more and more confidence on her second and third days. On her third day, the teachers put "kakak" out of her visible range and amazingly she was fine without even asking to be in company of "kakak"
We will be trying to let her alone in the kindergarten without "kakak" next week.

I know now my girl has grown up, so fast that we didn't even realize that.

By the way, we are not ready yet to let her be in school for full day. She is now with the school for 3 hours only and this is going to be the case for some time.

Wen Jia Learning Alphabet Now

I started showing Wen Jia flash card of Alphabet A-Z three weeks ago and she has managed to picked up a few alphabets since the first week.
She was able to tail with the name of objects when I uttered the Alphabet, for example A for (she will say Apple), B for (Ball ball), etc.
This set of flash cards was among her favourite flash cards now and she is now able to master at least 10 out of the 26 alphabets now. She is making quite a good progress now.

Wen Jia turns 7 months

Time flies and Wen Jia is now a 7 months old baby. She has grown from a tiny baby into a nearly 9kg, 80cm tall girl now.
I have seen her going through her cutest moment of all in these two months. She responses to us when we tease her; she mumbles a lot and smiles even more these days.
Since our maid's arrival on 3rd March, mum was able to enjoy greater flexiblity as she could go back hometown more often. We just need mum to be here every now and then to ensure that the maid is doing well in carrying out her duty as caretaker for Wen Jia.
We are fortunate as we have my mum to take care of Wen Jia sometimes, and in her absense SW's sister is kind enough to let Wen Jia to be at her house when we are at work.
We just want to be very sure that Wen Jia will be brought up in a condusive and healthy environment.