What Is Tot School, see post “‘Tot School’”
For the curriculum of activities I’m doing with Darius, go Letteroftheweek.

This is what we have done for 14 months – Lesson 4 Wk 1
Date: 28th Sep – 04 Oct 09

This week was a busy week for me to rush a project dateline and complete it. Still, I could find time to play with him and read to him for a while, except I forgot to read Nursery Rhyme and go through a Children’s song with him. And it’s a must to go for walk daily, if not in the morning, then in the evening. This shows that  it doesn’t really take a lot of time to do some learning together with your tot. Even five minutes of sitting down with him will benefit somewhat.

More details below: Long Post With Photos Ahead
——————————————————————————————-

Books Read For the Week

-English

Daily: A Is For Annabelle By Tasha Tudor

I took his fingers to trace the letters in the pages of the storybook

Storyline:
Read about storylines, my review and Darius’ reactions here
————————————-

-Chinese

Daily: We are reading  ‘我想飞’(Dolphin Media) a new book from the 15 books set for the first week. Read about storyline & review here

placeholder

placeholder

placeholder

===================
Daily: Still reading this series (中国第一套儿童情绪管理图画书 set of 8),this book ‘我好快乐’ for the second week.

Read about storyline & review here

placeholder

placeholder
————————————-
- Nursery Rhyme
No Rhymes this week, will do it next week instead to make-up
————————————-
- Bible Story
Baby In a Boat(Moses’ Story) & God Helps Us from ‘The Rhyme Bible Book for Toddler’.
An Excerpt:

Pharaoh finally
Sets us free.
Then God helps us
Cross the sea.

How the people
Dance and sing,
“Thank you, God,
For everything!”
——————————————————————————————-

Learning Toys / Motor Skills

We bought this toy from the Toys ‘R’ us fair over the weekend. Popping Shapes Jungle. The shaped animals’ centers could be pushed to reveal their other body parts, like arms, legs, ears etc. There’s the zoo box to hold them in which acts as a shape sorter too. A bit difficult to manipulate through the holes though. Darius knows to push the ‘buttons’ but he needs more strength as some are a little stuck.

He has been playing this piano musical toy from Vtech the whole week while I was busy at the computer. It was placed somewhere else in the past and only recently moved to the playmat. Suddenly he could actually press one of the keys repeatedly, move on to another key (blue), press press, come back to green one again, in full concentration. I was surprised to hear a melody. In the past, he would just press once, and press everywhere else, touch here and there. I wish to get him a  toy piano with full set of keys, but hadn’t found one I like.

He will carefully place and take off his hands slowly. Funny to watch his seriousness. Then, when it's done, he will smile a little when I yay! and clapped.

These cloth blocks were bought for him since he was about 7 mths and had been kept because he kept mouthing them. Finally, I took them out to do ‘stacking activity’ with him. After I showed him once to put one block on the other, he immediately followed. He can now put two blocks one by one, stacking a tower of three with me holding the bases (because too light). He did try to place a fourth one but it always topples. Not very good for stacking as they are not stable and even had a flip-flap cloth sticking out, hindering the stacking. I’ll need to buy other stacking blocks for him. When they kept toppling, he got frustrated and just swiped the blocks everywhere.

I like his face - so determined and full of concentration

We bought this little beads toy for sometime too but he only knew how to swing it about and bite off the paint. So finally I took this out and showed him how to move the beads from one end to the other one by one. He surprised me with his concentration and never giving up attitude as he tried hard to hold onto the bead to move it. It slipped many times as he tried to move the beads, but he did not just pushed it away compared to other activities that he couldn’t do. Finally, he managed to move one bead to the other side with some help in the middle. He’s still the shy humble boy, only gave a little smirk when I yeah and clapped.

Looking through 'A is For Annabelle' Storybook by himself

He has taken a liking to taking books off the green table and just sitting near the doorway to ‘read’ himself. He did this at least twice per day for the whole week. His favourite book is the Rhyme Bible Storybook For Toddlers and took that book to read countless times. I put it back and he would take it again. When he was not playing with toys, he would take the book and flipped through it. Strange since he used to dislike it.

——————————————————————————————-

Nature For Tot

Playing tag at the playground of animal statues

He loves anything that turns

One of our common activity but did this week with more intent. I let him step on the grass and walk about to have a feel. Too bad, can't go barefooted

Stepping Stones with Daddy

——————————————————————————————-

Exercise

I decide to bring him over to the other estate’s playground from this week onwards as walking around our estate has become a little boring. So we played at this huge playground which I hadn’t let him play before for the whole week. This week, I’m focusing on, ‘Climbing through tunnels, introducing climbing of bars, and also strength training of his hands’.

It was his first time climbing through a tunnel in a playground outside

Huge playground with lots of tunnels and slides, full of activities to do. Darius' fav activity is to climb the stairs.

A common activity in baby gyms. Strength training the grasp of the hands. I let go to let him hold onto the bars a little and grab him immediately after. He managed to hang for a while once when his legs were bent.

——————————————————————————————-

Arty Crafty

We had been doing scribbling on and off so this week we went back to it again since he hated watery stuff (paint).

I took out the small doodle board and held his hands to scribble. He still preferred to swing the pen around.

I tried holding onto his hand to let him have a feel of scribbling with crayons too. Then, I got the idea to let him ‘dot’ the paper instead with the crayon since he always like to tap on things. He liked it and started freely dotting the paper vigorously with the crayon, creating some dots.

He only dotted for a while and went back to his favourite activity of rolling the crayon forward and backwards over the paper, instead of taking it up.

——————————————————————————————-

Art Appreciation

Title: Does a Kangaroo have a Mother too?
Illustrator: Eric Carle

We are still looking through this book and I picked a page about the Dolphins to discuss about the art. I took up his fingers to trace the lines and told him the colours of it as we traced. There were also dots, so I took his fingers to find the dots and dot them. He got used to it after mid-week and took the initiative to move his index finger along the lines! At last some progress….
Read More Reviews & Darius’ reactions here.

——————————————————————————————-

TV Time

Some Wink to Learn this week. We also watched the DVD animation-chinese version of the chinese storybook (飞上天空的绵羊 & 我长大以后)from Dolphin media which we had been reading for the past two weeks. He likes it and watches intensely during breakfast time. We also watched the english vocabs after the story.

——————————————————————————————-

Fav Pic of the Week

He just loves this metal fence so much that he brawls when I pull him away.

——————————————————————————————-

No related posts.