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”.
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 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
Lavers are known as seaweed. They are sea vegetables and are forms of algae that grow in the sea. We particularly love this organic seaweed from Atomy. It comes with a package of 6 Packets. Each packet has big pieces in it.
