Happy New Year!

It's New Year's Eve and it's also Y&K's 2nd birthday. Exactly 2 years ago, I was at the hospital struggling with tandem breast feeding. 2 years later, I'm attending to 2 sick toddlers. They must have caught some virus at their birthday celebration, almost all the toddlers who attended the party are now sick too. We are praying hard that all the children will be well to welcome the new year.

Happy New Year everyone!!

2010 Popular Posts Round Up

This is a very new blog that I started mid this year to share our Playschool activities. I'm very happy that many has stumbled upon my blog and made some very nice comments about the activities that we do. It gives me a lot of motivation to continue thinking about more fun learning activities with them. It helps that my boys love their activity time.

Here are the top 3 posts that got the most views for Year 2010:

• Letter J Craft: J is for Jellyfish
• Homemade Toys: Car Ramp
• Coloring Rice

Thanks for reading and I hope to share with you more learning activities in Year 2011. Happy New Year!!

Blocks Play is Creative Play

I never like to play with blocks since I was a child and I still don't understand what's so interesting about Blocks Play even when I became a mother. But since almost all parenting books would recommend Blocks as a must have toys for any child, they have a set of wooden blocks and another 2 sets of plastic blocks. 

They weren't that interested with them when they were younger but since they turned 18 months old, the books were right, it is a must have. Block Play is limitless and creative. Today, instead of building and stacking, they lined up their blocks and called them a "train". I love the way they made the sound of the trains as they lined their blocks and pushed the train along.  This is what I call Creative Play.

Sensory Play: Shapes Rice Bin

I was slacking a little with their activities. I have been feeling lethargic and they did mostly worksheets and coloring. But yesterday, Y came running to me and asked for "activity time"! I was pleasantly surprised and of course it gives me great motivation. So, I took out the Green and Red rice we colored the previous week. I had wanted to do a Christmas sensory bin but haven't got to gathering the materials. With this request, I had to whip up something fast, so I poured the rice in the bin and threw in some shapes. I like the colors! They were supposed to scoop the shapes I asked for in their respective bowls. It was a lot of fun and they moved on to explore the bin on their own for a long time.

Y, concentrating on his scooping.

He calls this "Rain"

K, mixing the rice.

It look me a while to gather the bin and the boys waited patiently for me, following me in and out of the room, looking curiously at what I'm doing, shouting "activity time" from time to time. I can never associate the word Patience with a toddler so I can see that they really wanted their "activity time". They even let me take a picture of the bin before they dashed for it. There are many times when I feel like stopping the learning activities I'm doing with them and just switch on the box. But they never fail to stop me.

Singapore Art Museum Trans-Cool Tokyo

We brought the boys to Singapore Art Museum last Sunday with their cousins and we had a blast. My husband loves Pop Culture so we can't possibly give this a miss.

Worksheets for primary and secondary school students can be downloaded from the website and we printed for our nephews.

I love this!

There's an activity station with stamps and markers provided. The boys love this and spent a long time there.

The older boys joined in too.

I like the balloon artist they hired for the event. He is very creative and the guns he did just look different.

There was Cosplay and the older boys were excited to see the Dark Troopers.

And we were excited to see Mario.

Coloring Rice

Rice is a regular for our Sensory Play. Hoping to make it more interesting, we colored the rice today. There are lots of tips and recipes on coloring rice online. Here are a few by:

DLTK
E-How
Suite 101

Most of them combine rubbing alcohol or vinegar with food coloring. Again, I'm lazy, I just poured food coloring into a Ziploc bag of rice and get the boys to shake. It's not too bad. But as you can see from the pictures below, the rice is not evenly colored. I used about 1 or 2 tablespoon of food coloring to dye this small bag of rice and I think that's a lot. So, maybe you shouldn't be lazy like me if you are intending to color rice.

Green Colored Rice

Red Colored Rice

Can anyone guess the theme of upcoming Sensory Bin with this Green/Red color combination?

Sensory Play - Goop

I have been looking for Goop recipes that does not requires Borax (I have no idea where to get Borax in Singapore, please let me know if you do) and I was happy to find it over at Be A Fun Mum.

What You Need:
300 gms of cornflour
1 cup water
Food coloring (option)
Tray or containers

All you need is to mix the water and the flour. The preparation only takes a few minutes. I'm not sure if it's due to our humidity here. I think we need less water but I've got to try it out again.

Goop is an amazing substance that even I was intridged by it. It feels like solid when you touch it and when you try to lift it up in your hands, it just melts into liquid. Y&K enjoyed exploring with it very much. And they spent 45 mins at it and was very unwilling to leave. K even burst into tears asking for more Goop when I brought him to the bathroom. I think they can play for hours.

I like how sensory activities catches their attention and keep them occupied for long periods of time. 45 mins is a long time for a toddler to be concentrating playing with something. I like to talk to them during the experience. "What are you doing?", "What is that?", "How does that feel?" and I like it even more now because they can talk to me. K nodded, in smiles when I asked him if this is fun and he repeated "fun". Y told me the goop is like rain when it trickle from his fingers.