Friday 31 October 2014

Potato Gratin

Potato Gratin





Ingredients: 
  • Potatoes 
  • Parmesan cheese
  • Mozzarella cheese
  • 1 can of campbell mushroom soup
  • Other optional ingredients such as chicken or sliced button mushrooms (I always add a lot more sliced button mushroom because my kids love it. )

Method: 

Step 1 : Wash and boil a whole potato (do not remove skin from the potato yet) until potato is soft. Then place the potato until it's cool enough to remove the skin and slice it into slices (the size of the slice is your personal preference).
In fact, you can give your children a plastic knife to cut up the potato because size and shape really doesn't matter.

This is where my kids love to help.

Step 2: Pour out the can of campbell mushroom soup into a big mixing bowl. Mix in the sliced potatoes and all other ingredients which you would like to include. 

Step 3: Scoop the mixture into a disposable aluminium bowl or tin.

Step 4: Spread some parmesan and mozzarella cheese on top and bake it until all the cheese melts and turn golden.



I find that potato gratin alone is not enough to provide a full and balanced meal for the kids. So I prepared some meat patty and vegetables for them too. 

Meat Patty: 
Ingredients: 
Minced Chicken
Minced Fish
Tofu
Egg

Method: 
  • Mix all the ingredients together with a light soya sauce. 
  • Pan Fry it. 


Oats and Raisin Bars


Oats and Raisin Bars 

This oats and raisin bars can be made easily. In fact your child can do most of the work while you just help out occasionally. 

So enjoy making it. 

Ingredients

150g of rolled oats
100 g of demerara sugar
85g raisins
115g butter ( melted)

 Method: 

1. Preheat the oven to 190 Degree Celsius.
2. Mix the oats, sugar, raisins and butter in a mixing bowl. Stir well until even.Then scoop the mixture into your baking tin layered with baking paper. Press the mixture down firmly.Then bake in the oven for about 15-20 minutes (until it is golden).
3.Once done. Use a sharp knife to cut out the bars into the size you want and let it cool completely.




Thursday 30 October 2014

Stimulating Sense of Smell and Taste

Stimulating Sense of Smell and Taste

The sense of smell and taste comes very natural to the child. In fact, there is no need for  you to deliberately design any activity for it. In fact, I started making my baby smell different fruits at about 1 month old. She started tasting papaya at 4 months and the rest of the fruits at 6 months. 


When cutting fruits
For me, my baby used to cut fruits with me. So before I cut up the fruit, I would allow the baby to touch it, smell it  and taste it after that. I try not to over stimulate their senses so I do one fruit a day. Start with fruits such as oranges and lemon. 

Do remember to include fruits (or vegetables) that are: 
  • Sweet - dragon fruit, oranges, papaya
  • Sour - lemon, lime
  • Bitter - bitter gourd is a good and safe option.
  • spicy ( allow them to smell it first and may be not be suitable for too young children to taste.)


For the spicy catergory of food, I am always encouraging my children to just try it. You may not believe it but my 2.5 yr old loves eating black pepper crab. 

Training Gross Motor Skill


Training Gross Motor Skill

Activity 1:

When my baby would sit up right at about 6 months, I started giving her magazine paper to tear. Tearing will help their finger muscles to develop and hence giving them the strength to do other things. It is definitely difficult for the child to tear the magazine paper, so what I did was to tear it apart slightly, making it much easier to come apart. .


I love that curious face, " What is this?".




Activity 2:


Using her fingers to pick up the coloured balls and put them into a container with a small opening. This trains hand eye coordination. The baby will always try to use her whole palm to try and "catch" the balls. Encourage the baby to use the thumb and index finger.

concentrating hard.


Activity 3: 

Once the baby is better with her hands, give the child tools to manipulate with. For example, a spoon and tweezers.

Scooping "fishballs".
Faith is asked to scoop the balls from the pot into a container. 

Feed that animal.
I am lucky to have this book where all the animals in the book have their mouths literally opened( there is a hole at the mouth section. So I simply gave her the "food" and asked her to feed the hungry animals. This activity teaches the child to use a spoon correctly. An important skills for them to learn so that they can feed themselves soon. 
It is really not easy to use a spoon. 


The child will also try to use her hands to feed instead of using the spoon. But just encourage them.

 Using a tweezer. 

Using a tweezer trains not only their hand muscles, hand eye coordination but is also an important gross motor skill for them to learn to use chopsticks in the future. The motion is about the same. 



 *All activities that contain fur balls or cotton balls must be supervised at all times. 


Wednesday 29 October 2014

Theme: 7 Famous Landmarks around the World


7 Famous Landmarks around the World

Learning about famous landmarks around the world can be fun as we use different technique in art to recreate these famous landmarks.

1. Eiffel Tower, Paris, France


Using glitter glue, Faith created this scene of Eiffel Tower in the night sky filled with fireworks.
This is a good activity to train gross motor skills and helps toddler to practice squeezing. You need some strength to use the glitter glue. 


Carefully putting the yellow glitter glue on the stars.


squeezing lots of glitter glue to make the fireworks.

So satisfied with her work, she insisted on taking a picture with it. 

 2. Great Pyramid and Sphinx, Giza, Egypt.


Using cotton bud to dot the Pyramid and the Sphinx and finger painting for the sand and sky.

This activity trains hand and eye coordination. Dotting with a cotton bud may seem easy, but to dot them in all the white spaces needs some hand eye coordination.






 3. The Colosseum, Rome, Italy



My little girl suggested Finger Printing for this landmark.

She started with finger tip dotting. 

Realizing that this part of the building is about the length of her whole index finger, she started printed her whole index finger.

happy with her discovery.

Too slow to paint with her finger? So hand printing. 
 4. Taj Mahal, Agra, India




We tried doing glue resistant art.. but it did not turn out well. I guess it doesn't work with poster colour. Will try glue resistant art with watercolour the next time.








 5. Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Faith decided to keep it simple by just colouring it with colour pencil.


6. The Great Wall, China





Texture rubbing 

Faith suggesting colouring on a piece of rock for her Great Wall. 




7. Statue of Liberty, New York City, United States


We wanted to experiment with salt art. We painted with poster colour and rubbed salt on it. However, the effect didn't seem too great. Will try again with watercolour to see if we can achieve another effect.







Tuesday 28 October 2014

The Rod Vs Restorative Practice

 The Rod VS Restorative Practice 


All the methods have their pros and cons. I believe that there is always a place and time for the different methods to be used. The most important question at the end of the day is "which is the most effective method that will make our child learn".  



I can say that I am a very strong believer of "spare the rod and spoil your child". This is mostly true for the Chinese Singaporean family. I have seen many examples of parents sparing the rod and their children turn out spoilt and rotten. 

However, the rod must be used correctly. The rod must be used for sole objective of teaching the child and not to vent anger on the part of the parents. For me, the rod is used as the last resort, for repeated offences or serious offences (such as hurting others or themselves).  I use the rod on my 3 young children because I believe that certain actions must be stopped immediately and if that action is associated with the consequence of pain, the child will get the seriousness of their action and think twice before doing that again. 

For example, once my youngest daughter took a pen and deliberately try to poke her brother's eye. This offence is serious because it can cause harm to others and she knows from other circumstances that she is not allowed to play with the pen as it is sharp. So she got 3 strokes of cane for her action because firstly, this is potentially dangerous as she can harm her brother really bad causing him to be blind. Secondly, I need her to understand that she cannot repeat this action (which a 2.5 yr old may not fully understand if I explain to her) and so I associate her action with the consequence of pain. Of course, after the caning, I will take time to explain what they have done and why I need to cane them to teach them. 

The importance of caning as a punishment is NOT to punish the child but to send the message that his action is wrong and the consequence is severe. This is the most direct way to teach a child action and consequences, cause and effect. 

Let me give you some examples that I have come across. 

A child, age 6 used a pair of scissors to cut away her own fringe. I asked her if she was punished for it and the child said happily: "Never. My mummy says it's ok. Just don't do it again. My mummy said she did it when she was young also." 
My son knowing that this would have been a serious offence asked: " Your mummy never cane you?"
Child: " Never. I don't even know what's a cane. I never got caned before." 
My daughter asked: "why did you do that for?"
Child:" I don't know. For fun."

Of course, setting aside the parent's parenting style and the fact that the parent continued to leave that pair of scissors within the reach of that child trusting that she will not do that again, the horror is that the child took the incident so lightly and thought nothing of it because there was no serious consequences (i'm sure the parent would have scolded her) to her action. To her, she played with a sharp object and did things for fun. Well, to me, it would be a very serious offence because playing with a sharp object like a pair of scissors (no matter how small it is) can cause potential danger to the child and the other siblings. The child with access to the pair of scissors could have accidentally left it somewhere and the young sibling may pick it up to play. Even if a child is very careful, a child is afterall a child. In a fit of anger, a child holding on to a scissor unsupervised can result in very serious injury. In another story, a very careful child was handling a pair of scissors and then the younger siblings came along and tried to snatch the pair of scissors and she accidentally cut her sibling's finger. This is what we call an accident, unintentional. 

Back to the main point, a child needs to be taught the serious consequences of their action so that we may prevent(to the best of our ability) tragedies from happening. The rod is just a simple and most direct way to send the message that his action is wrong and the severity of the matter. Talking to the child after using the rod is as important as using the rod itself. The child needs to know where he has gone wrong and why he is wrong.  

As my children grow up, I realised that they grow out of the rod too. My eldest daughter no longer needs the rod as she knows very well the consequences of her actions and is able to self regulate. My son age 5 still needs reminder of the rod sometimes. 


Having said so much about the rationale for using the rod, the rod is ALWAYS used as the last resort. 

I practice timeout, restorative practice and then lastly the rod. It really depends very much on the severity of the offence and more importantly the potential harm the action can bring. It also depends on the age and personality of the child.

There is no "one size fits all" method. So as parents, we need to know our children, their personality and then decide the most effective method to make our child learn. 

Restorative Practice (RP) applied in my family

Restorative Practice (RP) applied in my family

An attempt of a 7 year old trying to use RP to resolve a conflict between her siblings.

Faith (2 years old) was standing at the naughty corner for hitting her brother. She has been standing there for about 5 mins. Our practice in the family is that the child standing at the naughty corner needs to be able to tell us what he/she had done wrong. Then, the child will need to apologise to the victim. The victim will need to forgive the aggressor and let the aggressor out of the naughty corner.
Emmanuel (the victim) refused to let Faith out.
Natalie (7yrs old) to Emmanuel ( 5 yrs old):
“ How do you think she is feeling now?”
“she is very sorry and must be sad now that you don’t let her out.”
“How do you think you will feel if you are standing there?”
“How would you feel if you have done something wrong, realise the mistake, apologised and yet not forgiven?”
“So what do you think you should do?”
Eventually, after what Natalie said, Emmanuel let Faith out and apologised for being insensitive.

This incident left an impression in my mind because our family have been practicing RP which is a method of resolving conflict using a series of questions ( to help with the thinking process) and dialogue to help make things right. Though dialogue in the story is not strictly RP, but it shows the attempt of Natalie to use RP to resolve a conflict between her siblings.
Though I have gone through a training on RP, my knowledge on RP is still very limited. I am still very new to this and still learning. But I find it really useful to apply within the family context. I’m just sharing how I have modified this technique and use it to resolve conflict among my children. Of course, I am a strong believer of “spare the rod and spoil your kids” as I have seen many examples of how spoilt some kids can be where parents do not believe in punishment. However, the rod is always used as the last resort and RP is always practice first. Ever since I learnt it.

So what is RP?
RP is a method which we can manage misbehaviour by helping the child to identify what had happened, the impact of their action on others and they can do to make things right.
One of the reasons my family adopts RP is because it helps to restore, repair and strengthens relationship. My hubby believes in this method too.

How RP can be applied in a family context.
When a child misbehaves, we would ask them a series of restorative questions. These questions serve to help the child think through his/her action.
Restorative Questions[1]:
Regarding Misbehaviour:
o    What happened?
o    What were you thinking of at the time?
o    What have you thought of since?
o    Who has been affected by what you have done?  In what way?
o    What do you think you need to do to make things right?

These are very simple questions, yet it guides the child through the thinking process of identifying what happened, his emotions and thoughts. It also helps the child to identify the impact of his actions on others. Finally, to come to an understanding and decide what he can do to make things right again.

As parents, we should understand that a young child may not be in full control of his emotions and actions. Therefore, it is for us to help the child to understand what has happened and how to move on.

Circle Time
Restorative Circle Time is used when a very serious conflict happens. Restorative Circle Time happens after I have addressed the aggressor using the restorative questions and the victim’s needs has been attended to as well. During this restorative Circle Time, I usually allow the aggressor to speak up first to describe what has happened. Next, I will ask the victim to talk about how he has been affected by the action of the aggressor. The aggressor will then be given a chance to explain to the victim his actions (usually not intentionally), apologised and attempt to make things right. My role as a parent is to facilitate the dialogue.

After this Restorative Circle Time, the children will have a better understanding of what happened, perspective from both sides and it strengthens relationship as the victim and aggressor can better empathize.




Circle Time can also be used to build relationship in the family.

What do we do during family circle time?
We usually take turns to talk about different issues or topic.
For examples:




  •  When the kids were younger, I put a piece of mah-jong paper at the center of the circle and told everyone to draw about what family means to them. After which, each of us will take turns to talk about what we have drawn.


  •  Also with a piece of mah-jong paper, my family has each written what we each like most about our family. Again, we took turns after that to talk about what we have written. 


  • We also talked about what makes a good friend. In these conversations, we can get a good idea of what values they are looking at when they are making friends. 


  •  Each of my family has also been given a few small piece of square paper to draw or write down our personal goals or what we want to achieve. These papers were later piece together forming a mosaic.    


  •  We have also done our individual liking and hobbies.


  • In the most recent family circle time, we went in a circle to identify the strengths of each family member. This did this as part of positive reinforcement. 













































[1] http://teachingwithteachers.com/restorative-practice/

Theme of the month: Water


Theme of the month: Water

Hook activities (Activities 1-4) to get the kids interested in the topic of water.. 

Water beads can be purchased easily at popular bookstore in Singapore. But ensure your kids do not eat them while having fun..


Activity 1: we explored different form of water thru spray art- water dripping down when too much concentrates tgt when sprayed at a close range and how a mist effect is created when water is sprayed at a long range.. 




Activity 2: observing how water can be absorbed through water beads..the kids just enjoyed looking at the beads growing in size as they take in more water. 

 Activity 3: sensory play with water beads.. 
Activity 4: water beads rolling art.. Prepare some poster Colour, dip the beads in and roll them around. 


 Activity 5: Learning about the Water Cycle. I got the kids to draw a simple representation of the water cycle. Then I added in the vocabulary and terms.

Activity 6: Learning more about Rain. I used the different coloured paper to teach them about how rain is formed. So the first cloud has very little water droplets and hence lighter in colour and they are further apart. As more and more water droplet is collected, they become closer and darker. Until finally, there are so much water droplets all squeezed together, they become dark because they block out most of the light passing through them. And that's usually about time they come down as rain.

Activity 7: Sources of water. We also did a short lesson on the different sources of water on earth. The children were surprised that we could find freshwater sources and they wanted to find out why these sources can give freshwater.

Activity 8: Water Pollution. We also talked briefly about water pollution and its impact on marine animals and humans.

w

Painting on Canvas


Painting on Canvas


This activity was impromptu as I couldn't think of any activity for the day. So I simply went to my art cupboard and found this hippo canvas. And she had fun for an hour.  This was my 2.5 yr old's first attempt at painting on canvas. 

I have always like "collecting" art items such as this set of canvas painting activity and recyclables. So i simply just store them all in my art cupboard. When i'm out of ideas, I like to just open myart cupboard and most of the time, I find treasures that I have long forgotten. 

Faith experimenting with the paint on canvas. 

It took her awhile to get to use painting.

For the more difficult and smaller areas, I have her a cotton bud to tap on those areas instead.