babee tales

Friday, 17 July 2009

I am so totally inspired by the dedicated mums who homeschool their kids. I chanced upon one of these homeschooling mum blogs and got hooked on the interesting activities she creates for her toddler. From simple every day materials, they can dream up of interesting activities that their kids enjoy and have fun with. I noted down some of the activities I could do with my kids and set about gathering materials to make the games. I kinda enjoyed it.

One of the games I was particularly attracted to is a geoboard. It is so easy to make, and yet offers the kids hours of fun. Get a wood panel (from daiso, cheap cheap $2 only), a handful of pins and a trusty hammer. Hammer the pins into the wood panel and you are done! Using the geoboard, the kids can learn to make different geometric shapes with rubber band. This is my home-made version, nat was particularly thrilled when she managed to change the triangle to a square.

We also did some painting and craft work as well. Sigh, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. I had grand plans of working together with the kids to create a paper plate crab, pretty straightforward, or so I thought. However, once they laid their eyes on the paint, there was no turning back. Paintbrushes were thrown aside and the tiny fingers headed straight for the paint pots. My initial reaction was to stop them and make the activity more structured, then I realised, what the heck, as long as they have fun, why not? So what started out as a craft activity ended up as a finger painting session. My babies enjoyed it immensely and so did I. Cleverly, this activity was strategically conducted just before bath time.

Nat and I also played a number game, another activity which I learnt from the homeschooling blogs. For the past few months, nat has been able to recite the numbers up to 20 but when you actually ask her to count something, she gets messy. Gary thinks that it is because the numbers are just memorised in her head but she can't actually relate the physical quanity of the objects with the numbers. This game is really simple and easy to do and helps them to learn counting. I did number cards 1-6. Then I encouraged her to put little cotton like balls on the card to represent each number. It's quite easy as there are already round ball shapes pre-drawn on the cards. Nat liked the game but got bored after a while, and started telling me how poky the balls were instead.

I know that didi lucas won't be as interested as nat in these activities, but I have included him in anyway. He enjoys it, in his own messy way :) haha. Didi is a lot more active and vocal these days. His attention span is also improving and on good days, I find him and jie jie sprawled on the bed (with supervision) watching Mother Goose nursery rhymes together. I also include him when I read to jie jie and unlike the past, when he gets bored after 5 seconds, he can now last at least a few minutes, to the end of the story.

It's nice to see the kids grow and have fun, run about and laugh in the sun. I will try to continue looking for exciting activities to keep them entertained. It's not easy but it's for the kids, and I enjoy it, so why not?