We went for the Singapore Book Fair 2009 this afternoon, which started today and will be ending on 7th June 2009 at Suntec Conventional Centre Level 4.

There wasn’t much of a crowd despite the free admission, which I attributed to the recent cases of Influenza A infections in Singapore.

The hindside is that we won’t have to squeeze among crowds but it would also mean that we would become obvious targets by stalls selling baby/children related products.

Less crowd than what we had expected...

Indeed, we were approached by quite a number of people, whom most we had politely rejected their further ‘advancements’. We did listen to a few for a longer period though to learn more about our different options/products available for Darius.

Anyway, prior to the book fair, I had two main objectives to fulfill here:

Firstly, I would like to find the 8-piece set for the Fairy Tales CD s (see Learning Activities for Darius (Part 3)) to add on to our current collection of the only piece. We had earlier saw sets of 8 pieces sold at S$99 at Popular Bookstore roadshows (one piece of S$15.90, two pieces at a bundled price of S$30) and regretted that we didn’t buy them then. As Darius had shown that he loved listening to the stories, we had since been searching high and low for the bundle but in vain.

Secondly, I’ve read from a local parenting forum that Wink To Learn had set up a booth here. I had hoped to find the physical flash cards for their series. So far, we have only played the flash cards to Darius via the television with their DVDs (see Learning Activities for Darius (Part 2)) and in order to complement his learning, we wanted to show him the physical cards too.

The first objective was met when we came across the booth selling the Fairy Tales collections. Though it didn’t come bundled into a nicely packed of 8 pieces that we had seen during the roadshows, the salesperson mentioned that they were offering the same price if we purchased 8 pieces, with the advantage of us getting the liberty to choose the stories that we liked. 

It wasn’t a bad bargain given the flexibility, so we started looking through the available titles. However, we realised that not many of the stories were that interesting, and so we decided to get 4 pieces for a total of S$60 instead.

After footing the bill, we also asked the friendly salesperson to take a photo of our family of three:

As for the second objective, it wasn’t long before we came across the Wink to Learn booth. It was manned by two youngsters and I decided to approach one of them to query about the physical flash cards.

It turned out that he was really very enthuasiastic in his products and his eyes were beaming with interest after hearing that we had been showing their DVDs to Darius since he was 6 months old. He even wanted us to talk to his boss (the founder of the company) as he believed his boss would also be very interested to learn more about our journey. Unfortunately he would only arrive later in the afternoon and we would have left the book fair by then.

Anyway regarding the physical flash cards, he mentioned that they do not have the product but would forward my feedback to his boss. Hopefully they will consider my suggestion as I believe it will be very helpful to parents who are showing the DVDs to their children.

We then proceeded on to check out the rest of the fair. Though there were quite a number of booths, most were not applicable to Darius.

We then came across a booth selling Chinese story books for kids. After flipping through quite a number of different books, we finally decided on two which had very nicely drawn pictures and interesting stories.

Nice story books at S$4.50 each

And so that ended our two-hour walk in the fair. We were glad we attended as we didn’t leave the place empty-handed. ^^

Before I end this post, let me share with you two ‘artistic’ (at least to me) photos taken during our trip today:

View from Darius' perspective on the MRT

Not a sight you would often see, especially to the ladies... ^^|

Related posts:

1. China-made Children’s Products Unsafe What’s new? Following a list of recent China’s below-par quality...