Meet Princess Towel.

Chris, my godson turned 8 last wk! He had a Star Wars party, complete with a Darth Vader suit and lightsabers.

Sophie also wanted. So we got her a towel and she was a princess.

Sometimes I really wonder who she’s taken after Neither James nor I am so flamboyant! She’s really into dancing and shaking the bum bum now.

Kwang How tried to test and trick Sophie with the "What do cows drink?" question.

She looked at him long and hard and said "Water".

And then he asked her, "Where does milk come from?" and she said "Cows".

And I asked her "What’s a baby cow?" and she said "Calf".

She sees them everyday. She knows. But it was so funny when Kwang How tried to trick her.

This was Sophie after 10 mins at the playground. She looked like she just had a shower. Nowadays, her hair is perpetually drenched!

"Can we go to the library now, Mummy?"

Ok I tried. I tried to bring Sophie to the playground to run around. The previous trip back (May 2009), I couldn’t bring myself to go downstairs even though the playground is just below the block of flats where we live. It was just TOO HOT. But this time round, I felt so bad keeping Soph in the house. So I thought I’ll bring her early in the morning and then hop over to the library next door to cool off.

We survived about 15 mins and had to get a lime juice at the library cafe and breathe for a moment.

One of the best thing about being a mum is to dress up your own kid. It’s like having a doll!

Except that when they grow up and decide that PINK SPARKLY SHOES are the prettiest things they’ve ever seen!

Yes we have moved into the dark… no… pink… side.

We went wild at Cotton On Kids in Aus. Sophie is like a Cotton On Kids ad – almost everything she wears esp her casual stuff are from Cotton On. Well, because for 5-10 bucks I get a really decent soft t-shirt with nice prints. There’s NO WAY I can get that kinda price even here in Singapore. Esp not for trendy prints and designs and most importantly, soft.

In the end, we made a compromise. The shoes were 2 pairs for AUS$15 so she got to choose the sparkly pink ones and we chose an understated match everything super practical black pair for everyday use (I wanted blue patent coz I love patent but James says matte black. Alright… )

On a side note, one of the things I love about coming home is looking through all the stuff that we left behind. It’s like Christmas all over again – oh! I didn’t know I had this/that?. Anyways I found this lovely trendy blue jacket in Sophie’s size and thought that my PILs got them for her BUT then I found out that it belongs to James! And his mum made them! Oh my! They are SO CUTE! Vintage some more… must keep must keep.

As mentioned in the previous post, I had in mind a daily plan but as I implemented it, I decided to improvise and added daily chores into our early morning routine.

Now that we do not have to rush out of the house for classes/meetings in the morning, it gave us some time to do some chores like washing the dishes, cleaning the house etc. At first I was doing it by myself but then I thought "Sophie can wash dishes!" so I got her to help and she’s amazing! Over those couple of days, she helped to wash up our breakfast and lunch dishes, with some supervision from me. Of course she uses too much detergent, figures out that putting a spoon under the tap makes a fountain and that squeezing lotsa soap makes it all the more fun and she leaves the water running BUT BUT overall, she gets the job done! While she does that, I can wipe the dishes and put them away! So so cool! Best part is she enjoys it! It’s a bit stressful for me I must admit at times when she handles the glass plates but I’m thankful she’s rather careful.

When we are done, we try to do one chore a day e.g. vacuuming/cleaning the windows. I try to assign her something that she can do like spraying soap and water and cleaning tables or silly things like wipe the doors. While I do the real work. Of course she doesn’t really know she’s not doing much but she loves it!

I hope we can keep this going because I doubt we’ll ever have a maid in our lifetime and I’m hoping if we start young, she’ll see that doing chores is what a family does together and not something that only mum does or a kid must be given a reward/paid to do it. Also I’m really hoping that she’ll be a good help when baby comes along. Hopefully the novelty doesn’t wear out! Will let you know

I like Charlotte Mason’s homeschooling philosophy but I don’t think I have fully grasped the fullness of it yet. This is how the Simply Charlotte Mason website describes it: – "A method of education popular with homeschoolers in which children are taught as whole persons through a wide range of interesting living books, firsthand experiences, and good habits."

There are essentially 3 parts to the education she prescribes – living books, experiences and good habits.

Living books are books that are usually stories written by an author with a passion for the subject and the subject comes alive. For example, Sophie has a book called "The Little Rabbit" (It is part of the Before Five In A Row reading list. She’s almost read it to death! The edges are bent and slightly torn.) It’s a story about how a little girl’s pet bunny gives birth and the life of the bunny. It’s a really simple story but the pictures are real photos. From it, one can learn about the life cycle of a rabbit, differentiate a pet bunny from a wild bunny, know what rabbits eat etc. It’s not a dry textbook or encyclopedia. Sophie loves encyclopedia type books as well but reading living books triggers her love to know more and understand more. 

Experiences – Charlotte Mason believed in providing a child with real life experiences. Reading from a book is not enough. Experiencing nature and culture is also needed. Sophie gets that a lot here but not sure how to fully implement that when we return for good to Singapore.

Lastly, teaching good habits - I’ve not figured out how to incorporate this fully into our lives yet but we’re getting there. Charlotte Mason has a whole list of how to do this and it’s a pretty hard read and almost seem archaic. BUT BUT so much truth to it. Just needs real discipling and vision to implement it.

Well, we’re starting somewhere. Not every book we have in the house is a living book but we pay a lot of attention to the kind of books Sophie reads. The Sonlight P3/4 books that we bought somewhat subscribes to the Charlotte Mason philosophy but in comparison, I much prefer the Five In A Row books and manual. There are some stories in the Sonlight books that are repetitive (e.g. the Fairy Tales) and Fairy tales, I find, are rather gruesome! E.g. stomping giants, ugly witches and magic potions etc.

Nonetheless, for this season, we’re reading Fairy Tales, for exposure sake. It’s quite fun re-reading these stories for myself too! Just to share some stuff that we’ve been doing with these stories: -

Jack & The Beanstalk

We painted some plants and planted some herbs. I meant to do a little booklet with Sophie about parts of a plant and life cycle of a plant but the internet failed on me so didn’t manage to get materials in time.

Sleeping Beauty

We made a castle out of a tissue box, toilet rolls and egg carton. I sewed a pillow for "sleeping beauty". Took out the lovely princess dress up cut outs that Steph gave Sophie for her birthday last year and she played dress up with them for a bit.

Now that school is over and most of our friends are gone, it’s time for us to resume to our grand plans of homeschooling. If we remain here for the next year, it kinda means that I can only homeschool Sophie 6 months in a year because school/creche is on for 3 months at a time, twice a year. Realistically speaking, counting going home on holidays and mission trips, I am probably only schooling Sophie a good 3 months a year! Eeeks! Well, we’ll see how it goes.

We started in April when school was slowing down and Sophie was so thrilled. We’re into Fairy Tales right now so we do 2-3 stories a week. So far we’ve read Emperor’s New Clothes, The Gingerbread Man, Sleeping Beauty, The Ugly Duckling, Jack and the Beanstalk.

Our Daily Schedule

8 – 9 am – Breakfast, Clean up, Chores (We read our Weekly Bible Passage over breakfast and sometimes we listen to stories/music.)

9 – 10 am – Homeschool – that essentially means reading a story, doing activities related to the story, writing, and phonics.

10 – 11 am – Free play and snack (I need a break ah! Normally I cook or bake something here. She doesn’t really like just playing on her own so she’ll just have her snack and then hang around and help out.)

11 – 12 pm – Craft

12 – 1245 pm – Outdoor/Friend Time/TV (Depending on the weather)

1245 – 2 pm – Lunch

2 – 3 pm – Quiet TIme (This means I take a rest and Sophie either reads on her own or takes a nap)

3- 5.30 pm – Daddy Time (It’s the hols now so Daddy is a bit freer but once he’s working again and Baby No 2 is here, we’ll need to figure out what to do here.)

5.30 – 6.30 pm – Dinner

6.30 pm – 7 pm – Bath and Stories

7pm – 7am – Sleep

Schedules are great but I’m not really good at keeping to it. I try to flow with Sophie as well. The schedule just keeps me sane and aware of what I’m doing. It helps to give Sophie a structure and what to expect. For example, she’s starting to understand what I mean when I say "Free Play time!" The thing about being an only child and being 3 going on 4 is that she loves to do stuff and play pretend. But she needs company and that means me most of the time if her friends are not around! She’s not so keen on doing her own thing if I’m around. In structuring a free play time, I’m hoping that it’ll give her some space to discover things on her own and learn to play on her own for a bit.

Our Weekly Plan

Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays are English story days. I incorporate Social Sciences and Science into these days, depending on the topic at hand.

Wednesdays are Chinese story days.

Fridays are Creative Math lessons and outing days.

We don’t school on Saturdays and Sundays.

Sophie could spell her name even before she could recognise alphabets. That was only coz I kept repeating it to her.

Recently I found out that she can spell Toby, Evan, Cow, Dog! I didn’t even know that kids could spell before they can read or write?!! Is that normal? I’ve not intentionally taught her how to spell these words but I think she picked them up when we read. "Cow" really surprised me coz one day she drew a cow and then wrote the word "cow" under it.

This homeschooling business is a lot more complicated than I thought. I keep thinking there must be a process to all this, e.g. recognise alphabets, learn sounds, write (Montessori book says that they learn to write before reading), read, spell. Sophie seems to have got them all jumbled up and I’m confused. Wish I had studied some early childhood education degree rather than my econs/euro studies degree.

Anyways, I’m happy she’s picking up things along the way.

James created a outdoor house for Sophie over the weekend.

He sealed up part of the balcony using bits he found around the base and made windows for the light to come in using transparencies (remember those things before computers?). He even found some whiteboard for writing on and a frame for a pretend door.

Very very cool.

I’ve always imagined for us to have a place for Sophie to play outdoors, yet within the confines of home. We’ve been doing lotsa craft, painting and drawing outdoors. We even started a small garden starting with planting herbs.

I really like this picture.

Kristi, who is 6, really likes to play with Sophie very much and they play really well together. Last weekend before Kristi and her family left for Auckland, I got them to take this picture. I was quite glad Sophie was actually keen to take the picture with Kristi coz sometimes she’ll just run away.

It’s hard when friends come and go on the base after each school ends. This time round, we made sure that we talked to Sophie lots before her friends started leaving and she was ok saying bye. I hope we handled all the farewells better than we did the last time.

I declare that Passing The Parcel (the one that has a little gift with each unwrapping) IS THE BEST preschool birthday party game EVER!

Ooooo the kids love it! We’ve been playing it at every birthday party.