How to potty train your child?

“How do you potty train your kids?” asked my friends. Since this topic is quite popular among some of my friends thus I guess it will be nice to share my own experience. 

Some important tips:

• Every kid is different 

• More haste, less speed 

• Observe your child’s readiness 

• Make it fun

• Let’s go toilet together

Every kid is different. The rumour says that girls potty trained earlier than boys. Does it apply to all girls? I don’t think so. My girl was only able to ditch the diapers totally when she was 5 years old but my boy was diaper free when he was just barely 4. So, it really depends on your child’s personality and readiness.

More haste, less speed. I remembered the stress I had when my girl’s preschool teacher said that most of her classmates were toilet trained and my girl was the last two who were yet to. I discussed with the teachers that Claire was not ready yet because she was a year-end born baby. But the stress from school and family “how come your girl is not diaper-free yet?” were lingering and thus I decided to potty her earlier even though she was not really yet. Consequences? Lots of peeing incident, change of bedsheets, and sadly cries. :( After two weeks, I decided to stop and try after a month later thinking of how should I make this better.

Observe your child’s readiness. How do you know your child is ready to attempt this new milestone? 

• Their diapers are dry or very less pee during their awake time. It is a super good news If their diaper is also dry during nap time. 
• They want to go toilet with you to pee which means your little ones are interested to know how adults pee in the toilet. Oh yes, if this happen, please really welcome them to observe you peeing in the toilet. My boy became interested when he saw his father did his pee. It became like a mini-sharing session between them on how to aim their pee into the toilet bowl. :p

Make it Fun!

Week 1 and 2:

• Show them books, videos and songs about potty training or how is it like to become a big boy and girl without diapers. There’s quite a number of them online and my favourite videos is: Elmo Potty Time.
• Involve your child in the purchase of his potty. Show them pictures of some of the potty you have selected and let him choose which to buy :)
• Teach him how to pull down their pants and sit on the potty.

Day time Diaper Free Challenge. We had reward charts which rewarded her for totally dry diapers (though sometimes I feel “wah! Waste diaper!” But this is what she is comfortable with”) to train her confidence level. “Yeah! See no pee pee!” I exclaimed. We used the Huggies XL diaper so you can see the pee indicators clearly. Place potty at the living room so she is able to access it easily.

If your child is not diaper free during awake time, then it may take a few weeks to train that first.

Week 3 - 5:

Nap/Night time Diaper Free Challenge. When your child is totally diaper free during awake time excluding naps. It is time to observe his readiness during sleeping time. Is there pee on his diaper? Or no pee at all? If so, your child is ready. Yeah!

Try naps first because it is shorter sleep time and achievable milestones to build confidence before transition to night time challenge.

Do the same thing that you did for the day time challenge with potty inside the bedroom. Provide a sensor nightlight which will brighten when they go to their potty or have a portable kids nightlight so they can hold it to go to the potty (especially if their bedroom is dark).

Please be patient and expected pee accidents. Encourage your child and tell them is ok and continue to try. If persistent accidents happen, it means your child needs to a break from this training (maybe you too!) and try it maybe a week later.

Let’s go toilet together!

This may seem weird for first time parents but seeing is doing. Let your child see you pee and even poo. They will learn what are good habits and what to do in the toilet. Don’t be shy :p

Lastly, the stress and lack of child’s readiness prolong training. Just remember that your child ultimately will be potty ready or train. Breathe and relax. This is really true after I tried the above steps for my younger child. He was totally diaper free a few days before he is 4 years old. 

All the best :)

Deariebear Mommie

How to use Zearn to learn maths?

I chanced upon this useful maths website, Zearn when my girl was doing her online learning. 

During the circuit breaker. I decided to let my boy to try out Zearn for his Maths out of desperation because I did not know what other activities we can do the whole day. Imagine I have to plan activities for them to do the whole day everyday..

Fortunately, It turned out to be a really useful learning website for them to learn Maths and both of them are “killing” it.

For students:

Zearn is very simple and straight forward to use. I like the fact that it uses a real person to explain the concepts and also infuse with games and badges to motivate students. It included clear progress chart for both students and teachers or parents to monitor students’ progress.

For parents or teachers:

Zearn allows you to create a class roaster of students and assign the grade level to different students.

Zearn helps you to monitor learning progress of your children or students.

It also provide clear descriptions of the different “missions” and guides for offline activities to reinforce the maths concepts.

To conclude this review: It is a useful online website to learn Maths. It provides clear instructions and simple games to motivate students. Another great news is that it is free! I’m not too sure how long it will be free but it allows free registrations due to convid. Thus, please sign up for your kids while it is still available unless you wish to pay for it :)

Storytelling: 小鹿过生日

Title: 小鹿过生日 (Little deer‘s birthday party)

This story is about how a little deer neglects his friend’s feeling over a toy and ends up lonely. It is shared in Chinese. 这故事是关于小鹿怎么为了一个玩具而失去了朋友.

Taken from one of the stories from “爱发脾气的孩子” - 

You can this purchase from Qoo10. It has a series of children stories which share about proper behaviours.

Here is the full video:

Note: We have no intention to breach any copyright infringement. This is to share love of storytelling among kids. Reading aloud helps kids on their articulation and confidence. Hopefully it will aspire kids or children to read aloud.

Storytelling: Sunshine and Snow

Recently, my girl finds recording herself reading is cool and fun. So she said “Mama, please record my reading and post it up so my friends and teachers can see.”

Title: Sunshine and Snow

So this is her first storytelling and the title is “Sunshine and Snow”. It shares about how the twin sisters had disagreements about how their birthday party should be. It is a meaningful story to share with your children about siblings’ squabbles and its consequences. This story is one of the many stories in this book called “The magical stories”. 

You can purchase this book from Amazon.

Please view this video on the full storytelling. 

Note: We have no intention to breach any copyright infringement. This is to share love of storytelling among kids. Reading aloud helps kids on their articulation and confidence. Hopefully it will aspire kids or children to read aloud.

My boy is good with Maths!

My 5 years old boy started learning how to add 2 digits number using tens and ones a few days ago and is really getting the hang of it. He will always tell me “I am a smart boy!”. 

How did my boy become so confident in his Maths? His Maths journey when he was about 3.5 years old when we were in Mumbai. My girl was enrolled in seriously addictive maths in Mumbai and my boy kept pestering me to let him join his sister’s maths lesson. After a trial, we felt that the room was too small with the number of students and Pierre was pretty active and disturbed her sister in class. Yes, tuition centers in Mumbai are really small. Most centres have only 1 classroom and is small unlike Singapore. So I told him to wait till he is 4 years old. (A summary of tips will be at bottom of this page).

That time I was wondering whether I was taking away his interest to learn so I played counting with him using Legos and toys. When he was about 4 years old, I chanced upon Kumon Mumbai and I enrolled him mainly because the room is bigger :P. To my surprise, he was really focused and learnt fast. Kumon Maths encourages repetitive practice everyday and Pierre did it diligently from counting and writing numbers and learnt till addition of single numbers till 7 (e.g 3+7). He can easily answer you with simple additions. :)

After when we are back in March due to potential convid lockdown in India (yes, we caught the first flight before the news of the first lockdown was confirmed), we totally stopped Kumon lessons. Luckily, I had some Kumon Maths books which I bought long time ago (gathered in dust) for my girl. Great that I could use those books for my boy. Within these few months, he completed two Kumon addition Maths and now almost finished with basic subtraction book.

As we were all stuck at home, I helped him to enrol zearn.org and dreambox for Maths online learning. These are free during Summer due to convid-19. These organisations support virtual learning during school closures. My kids really love these two sites and improved their Maths’ skills during Singapore’s circuit breaker.

Currently, he is learning Maths concepts instead of just memorising basic addition. But trust me. Those basic maths additions which he became so good at did help him to learn the concepts faster. 

I’m happy and amazed how my boy is able to do primary 1 Maths when he is just K1. He might maybe completed Primary 1 maths at the end of the year? 

Most importantly, my boy became confident because of his Maths learning journey and you will often hear him say “I am good in Maths!”.

To sum up the tips:

• Start your toddler’s interest in Maths by using toys or even things at home to get him counting.
• Use Kumon worksheets or books from Amazon:
• Start with this basic addition book with counting, writing numbers and simple additions

Grade 1 Addition

 

• Practice more additions with this book.

My Book of Addition

 

• Start with basic subtraction with counting backwards, writing numbers and simple subtraction

My Book Of Simple Subtraction

 

• Practice more subtractions with this book.

Grade 1 Subtraction

 

• When your children or toddlers are more comfortable in additions and simple subtractions, you can introduce him Maths concepts of Tens and Ones.

Have Fun and Be Amazed with your Kiddos!

Cheers,

Deariebear Mommie