Parenting and Kids

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Top 10 Highlights of June 2012

Another month has passed and it’s time to do a recap of all the fun stuff that have been happening here on Dominique’s Desk

Without further ado here are the  top 10 highlights of last month.

 

the 3 kids

1. The kids visited a few places of interest last month. They went on the Singapore Flyer, River boat ride and Hippo bus during the 1st week of  June. It wasn’t that fun an experience for them as there were massive delays in our  itineary and the media invite outing by OMY was very badly planned. The worst part  was the $5 Toast box gift voucher, which looked like it was lying in a drawer and fished out just 10 days short of expiry, that they sent after I ranted about how bad it was organized.

the beautiful collage

2.  The kids really enjoyed their outing to the Singapore Art Museum. They got to try out quite a few crafts and really had fun playing around with the interactive exhibits.

Tiger girl reading

3. Tiger Girl is into reading lately. She loves taking brochures and books and try to read them. Most of the time I would have to read them out while pointing out the words to her.  However now she is able to recognize certain alphabets and would happily say them while pointing them out to me instead.

doggie boy

4. The kids had great fun trying out the various occupations like firefighter, police man, pest control, supermarket manager, Baskin robbins ice-cream salesman, car mechanic among others during their visit to Kidszaina in  South Korea

everland

5. I loved seeing the flowers when we were at Everland. It was really like having the storybook scene come to live before me with the beautiful gardens. The best highlight for me there was the rose gardens where I got to enjoy the roses.

bumper car ride

6. The kids had a blast at Lotte World  and really went wild on the kiddy rides. The best thing was that there were two sections- indoor and outdoor. Majority of the rides were indoor and we got to enjoy them in the cool air-con comfort.

Coex Aquarium

7. We visited one of the biggest  aquarium that we have been to date – Coex Aquarium while on vacations in Seoul and the kids and I were fascinated by the large collection of fishes which were ingeniously displayed.

Tiger girl and Pororo

8. Pororo is Tiger girl’s greatest love at the moment. She simply adores the little Korean penguin and loves carrying her Pororo water bottle around while wearing the light up Pororo shoes.

9. I’ve started writing on a new series- Supermom 101 where I document my daily routine and how I make this work for me- coping with family, house and work.

 

10. We had a guest post by the creator of Blue Clues and Super Why on how to efficiently use TV viewing as a teaching media.

Miscellany Monday @ lowercase letters PhotobucketTop Ten Tuesday at Many Little Blessings

Creating a Multilingual Learning Environment at Home

Teaching material

Creating a conducive learning environment at home is essential for optimal learning. At home we are teaching our children in a variety of languages and it only seems proper to have a selection of material in the different languages to assist learning.

It is essential to give your child the opportunity to be associated with the various types of learning material be it books, DVDS, CDs, flashcards, interactive apps and programs from young. Through constant exposure and immersing a child in the different languages they get more accustomed to hearing, speaking and using it in their daily life. They will be able to relate to both the spoken and written version of the language and build up confidence using the language.

In our aim to raise multilingual children  I have gathered materials in English, Mandarin and Japanese. I have purchased flash cards in English, Mandarin and Japanese. I also have different graded  readers and story books in English, Mandarin and some books in both English and Mandarin  for my 3 kids so that they are exposed  to our two main languages from birth.  I’m still sourcing around for elementary level Japanese storybooks which are not too expensive. I have printed my own learning materials for them in Japanese which are adapted from my notes or websites which I have found online.

I do not need to source for additional material for teaching the children Cantonese as the dialect uses the same written Chinese characters. The only difference is the pronunciation of certain words like for example the number ” ONE” is “一”() in Mandarin and (yat) in Cantonese.  It’s amazing that the kids are able to distinguish between the two and not get it mixed up.

We focus on English, Mandarin and Cantonese daily while Japanese is practiced once a week as it’s the fourth language we are introducing to the kids so the time set aside for this language is lesser then the other three.

One of our favourite games which we play with our  21 month old is counting steps. We count from 1 to 10 with her in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese as we go up or down the flight of steps leading to our apartment unit. She has fun climbing stairs and learns her numbers in four languages at the same time.

How do you create a learning environment for your child at home?