The Apple's Diary!

There was a rampant outbreak of the dreadful H……. Hand Foot Mouth Disease (HFMD) in the children's preschool. The boys stayed home for most of January as a result. This was bad because we needed to take leaves to stay home with them too. Staying home is problematic because they need to exhaust their energy wisely, else there would be endless troubles. So I started to assign homework daily to keep their morning occupied. practice writing small boy also not spare from writing practice Thankfully my mum came over to help so she could supervise the boys doing their 笔画 practice and either one of us will guide them in Phonics. Since I had to be home, spring cleaning was completed early this year and the boys are ready to usher in Chinese New Year. lucky them The boys are blessed to be wearing Chateau de Sable label for this festive season. That's because there is an outlet at IMM which I stumbled upon one weekend. However, the maid remains a...

The preschool returned the 2nd semester progress report on Jonathan last week and although there is improvement in him, there are many areas we need to work on it. Two of the biggest challenge remain would be Chinese and the general pronunciation on words in both languages. Enjoying gym time How do we work on his Chinese? Besides sending him to Berries and the constant revision from what Berries taught, I realised that there's a gap. He has very little interest and confidence in using the language to express himself. To grasp a language proficiently, we must first "HEAR" , "SPEAK" and then "WRITE". For the Chinese medium, he has not heard enough, thus how can he therefore speak and write? Berries suggested setting a day every week as a "Chinese day". Everyone in the family must speak in Mandarin and parents must embrace the language with much enthusiasm so the child can overcome any fear. I am rolling this out soon in my family an...

And so we said goodbye to 2015 and ushered in 2016…. in the stillness of the dark while I was in la la land. I hadn't blogged much in December 2015, in fact, there's only 1 post?! That was rather unusual but looking at the options, blogging sat pretty low in priority. 2015 had been kinder to me. There were quite a few major changes and I couldn't say that my last few days of 2015 went smooth and well for me. Still, there were simple occasions to be thankful for as we transited to 2016. Matt's Inside Out Birthday Cake The youngest in the family celebrated his 3rd birthday with an Inside Out theme. I was totally awed by this creation by Cloud9 and was glad to hear the birthday boy exclaimed "Inside Out, my favourite!" There was no big party, just a lunch gathering with my family and a simple school celebration. Looking so grown-up School celebration took place in his new class, no longer the toddlers in N1 Clover but moving onwards as pres...