Multilingual Books for Children

Fiction and Non-fiction books are common visitors to our house. Every month I try to borrow new books for the boys to read. Sometimes when we do not get around to visiting the library I would let them read the children e-books which I find online.

Children’s Books Forever is a site which I have recently been introduced to. At that website there are many different children’s books which are FREE to download in PDF format. What I really like about the site is that there are books available in different languages like – German, Spanish, French and Japanese among other languages. The books are written by Hans Wilhelms and are catered for readers from toddlers to pre-schoolers.

The storybooks have very colourful illustrations with realistic drawings of animals that are depicted in the various stories.

Ten little bunnies is one of the short stories which I read with the boys. It is a book on counting backwards from 10 to 1 with a twist at the end. It definitely works well as a before bedtime story which you can read to the kids before they drift off into slumberland.

Do check out the site for more interesting online reads for your kids.

Weekend Reflections- Having Fun

This weekend the boys had fun at West Coast Plaza. We went there after church service today and the boys were thrilled to go on a free kiddy ride, play on the WII- Mario Kart game and try out the Daytona like racing car on the specially built circuit.

Ryan got his chance to try out handling a remote control car like the one shown in the picture above. It was not easy for him to maneuver the car around the circuit. It looked more like he was playing bumper cars then a remote control car as it kept on bashing into other cars or the sides of the track.  I tried it myself and it really wasn’t easy to steer even with a dial shaped remote control.  It takes lots of skill and practice to get the toy car zooming skillfully around the track without crashing.

The boys also enjoyed going on a furry green elephant kiddy ride. This movable ride was steered with a steering wheel and Ryan had fun giving Roy a ride around the aisle of the shopping mall.  On normal occasions I would not let the boys try out such a ride as the $2 price tag for a 3-4 minutes ride is really not worth splurging on.

How was your weekend?

Happy Birthday to Me

Ryan cutting his cake with Roy watching next to him

Weekend Reflections- Playing Scrabble

Scrabble is one of the games which I recently introduced to my boys.  I find this a very educational game as it not only challenges them mentally it also helps to improve their spelling capabilities.

The boys are still rather young  at 3 and 6 yrs old and have quite limited vocabulary so we play this game slightly differently from how it is traditionally played.

The boys are allowed to draw as many letters as they need from the pot and then form words on their letter holder.

They need to use a minimum of 3 alphabets to form a word.

So far Roy has managed to come up with these words without prompting

- One

- Two

-Mama

- Roy

- Ryan

- They

Ryan is able to spell many more words on his own as they have spelling in his school regularly. Some of the words he spelt out for me included- cake, eating, children, happy, birthday, mummy etc.

I find it is a good tool in getting toddlers like Roy interested in spelling and learn new words in a fun and interesting way.

Do you play scrabble with your kids?