Raising Our Successful Children, Singapore Mom Blog: Literature Based Learning

Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse

When we saw this book at a bookshop", I was attracted to it and when I flipped through the book, I fell in love with it immediately. The illustrations are really beautiful and the moral of this story is something I want my children to learn - " Be Thankful For Who You Are" and " Be Contented With What You Have". So immediately, I knew I found another book for our Literature Based Learning, another book with a good moral for the kids.

Character Study:

For this book, I decided that it is going to be a more art and craft based learning. So, we made Alexander, the mouse and Willy, the wind-up mouse.

We reused toilet rolls, painted it grey and added the details to make it into a mouse. Really easy.

We cut the toilet roll into this shape and use white glue to stick the sharp end together.

One of the things that caught my eye about the book was the beautiful background. Hence, we did a flower sponge painting on a piece of yellow paper.

This is the final product of the mouse and the background.

Making the Lizard.

I printed out a picture of a lizard and cut out the shape. I put the outline on top of another piece of paper and squeeze some poster colour on it and allowed Faith to use sponge to spread out the paint.

Once the paint is spread out, we remove the piece with the outline and got the shape of the lizard.

We added a big googlies eye to complete our lizard.

I used the characters that we created to talk to the children about each character. I asked them questions like - " Are they happy with what they have?" and " What kind of character are they?". After listening to this story, the children learnt to be contented with who they are and be thankful for who they are because the lives of others may seems true and perfect, but may not necessarily be true.

I used this opportunity to educate the older children about cyber space as well. With social media platforms like facebook, it is easy to be deceived just by looking at the photos people post. Hence, what we see maybe very different from what is going on from reality. Hence, we should just be happy with what we have and with our lives, instead of envying people all the time.

The kids love to role play with the characters. Faith uses the character figures to re-tell the story.

I simply love her story telling and how she simplifies the story. From her story telling, I get to know how much she actually understands from the book.

After the art and craft session, character study and story telling, we moved on to more academic activities.

For number recognition and counting, we did 2 dot to dot activity. Faith loves counting and joining those dots. It helps her to practise her hand-eye coordination and this trains her hand muscle as well.