Den spent the night with my parents. We went over to my parent's house to pick up some stuff last night, and she refused to come home with us after that because my brother (who works in China) & 3rd Aunt (who lives in Seremban) were both there.
This morning all of us went out for brunch.
We started school at 230pm... these two weeks our schedules are really really unstable...
First, we practice the verse. Her phonic is getting better and she can kind of guess the word by looking at the verse I wrote on our whiteboard.
Then, we read a good story from "The Children's Book of Virtues". Today's story is about the little boy from Holland, who put his finger in the dikes to stop the seawater from flooding the country. Even though he had to spend a night in cold (no one realize he was there) and his hand was numb, he was willing to hold on as long as it took to get the job done. His bravery and perseverance saved Holland.
A good lesson for today's children. Everything comes easily nowadays. So even when a tiny bit of hardship came along, they will just give up. This is a good lesson to remind Den whenever she thinks something is too hard for her, she should not give up.
In fact, I always like to make it a bit hard for her. At least from time to time. We went to Langkawi 2 months ago. I purposely packed a small bag for her to carry. It is kind of heavy and I could have put everything in my bag pack, but I want to toughen her up a bit. Don't want her to take things for granted. She carried it without any complaint.
I assigned house chores for her too. Since she is still quite young, she mainly has to learn to take care of herself and her things - change herself (I lay out the outfits), dispose of her own diaper, put dirty clothes into a basket, put back her shoes, clean up anything she played/studied, etc.
Besides that I also let her clean the balcony and main grill and door. Today, she helped me snap french beans for dinner. I want to increase the things that she does at home. I am thinking of putting her in charge of collecting all the rubbish from every dustbin in the house. Maybe is time to teach her how to do dishes and wipe the dining table too?
After the story, we prayed.
Then we read another story from "A family treasury of Little Golden Book". We almost finished all 46 stories...kind of sad. We started off hating this book then love it and very soon we have to leave the book...
Today it is a short story about different kinds of houses that people live in. That got us interested in looking for pictures of different houses. We found interesting pictures of igloos, tree houses, cave houses, mud houses, trailers, traditional Japanese houses (with paper wall), castles, and tents (I love internet, I told Shu Teng I can homeschool without Sonlight as long as you give me internet!), and of cause when I asked Den what house she wants to live in -- CANDY HOUSE! We printed out the pictures and pasted them into her scrapbook. Maybe later she can draw a house in there too.
We had to break for tea (hmm..more like coffee & milk) before we continued our phonic.
Phonic was better today. Either the "tea" help or she finally getting used to "H" sound. Either way, I am grateful. Today's paragraph is much shorter too.
Since we finished phonic early, we had time for math. I started her on Book 5 (Q-dees mathematics foundation program). We learn the concept of 11-20. As in 11 is 10+1, 12 is 10+2, etc. I like this program because it emphasizes the concept part. I think it is very important. Every kid can recite 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.....100 but do they know exactly what does each number stands for? Q-dees is very slow at the beginning but I think is very good in the long run.
Btw, this is a very very old program. I'm not sure if the Q-dees nowadays still use the same program. It passed down from my Pastor's daughter (who is going to do her master's in Aug 2009) to a sister in Christ and then she passed it to me when she moved to Singapore! I like it very much and decided to use it on Den even though 1 of the books is missing (Book 7, I intend to improvise!).
After that, she helped snap beans and then work on 2 math worksheets while I cooked. I didn't get to check her work until 8pm, after dinner. I realized she didn't finish one of the pages and the other was all wrong because she did addition on a subtraction sheet!! That's the first time this happened!
I think she was too eager to go play UNO with her daddy (he came back early today) and just tried to get everything done as fast as possible. I made her redo them and finished before she go for a night swim with ST.
This is part of her reward. She used to refuse to poop in the toilet (she usually doesn't wear any diaper, she would then ask me to put a diaper on her before she want to pass motion. It is really quite ridiculous, putting a clean diaper on so that she can poop there!). So I put up a poster up, every time she popped in the toilet she get one star. For every 3 stars, she gets a reward. We discussed and let her come up with reasonable rewards like playing in IKEA, ice cream (if she is not sick), going to bookstores, swimming at night (when the weather permits), etc.
Now she only gets a reward for every 5 stars. She is no longer passing motion in her diaper but she refused to let me take down the poster and insist in continue the reward system...hmm...I need to think of some way out of this.
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