Value Bookshop's Reading Notes

It’s not good for children to watch too much television. Unfortunately, many of us mothers find television to be a very useful babysitter. If you are cracking your head on how to keep your children busy and away from the television, here are some ideas.

• Do simple crafts. Little children can do some gluing e.g. gluing beans on an art paper to form the letter B.  There are lots of things you can do with paper plates and toilet rolls too.  See how I did this kite craft with my kids.  If you need more craft ideas, check out this affiliate link: LITTLE KIDS CRAFTS
• Older children can learn origami.
• Maybe someone’s birthday is coming up, or a celebration like Christmas or Father’s Day. How about crafting a card.
• Make a candy flower.  Or a lollipop flower.
• Teach them to do some Manga drawing.
• Give them balloons to play with. Oh, this one will definitely keep them occupied for a long while. You can also encourage them to draw on the balloons. This is actually a good pre-writing activity.
• Alternatively, make water balloons for them to burst. Of course this one has to be done outside the house.
• Playdoh. Here is a recipe for uncooked playdoh and another for cooked playdoh.
• Go bicycling.
• Make cookies or muffins together.
• Play boardgames, card games, puzzles and many other kinds of interesting indoor games you can find on the shelves of at the stores.
• Bubbles
• Singing time. Sing nursery songs, folk songs, church primary songs etc….
• Read books.
• Make a smoothie.
• Play with Lego or building blocks.
• Put out the kiddy swimming pool.
• Playing with a ball. Use it to bowl over some bottles. Try to throw it into a box or your laundry basket.  Toss it up and catch it to improve coordination.
• Play hide and seek. An alternative is you hide their teddy bear (or whatever) and they have to find it.
• Pretend play. Pretend to be a doctor and care for all the injured soft toys. Pretend to work in a restaurant where they need to take people’s orders and cook the food. Pretend to be a teacher.
• Play charades. Take turns acting out something and the other has to guess what it is.
• Give them simple house chores like wiping dust off the furniture.
• Give them blankets and sheets to put over chairs and tables to make like a camp.
• Let them watch you as you cook. Teach them the name of foods and vegetables. Give them kitchen tips like “how come mommy doesn’t cut her hand when she cuts the vegetables?”
• Make and play with sock puppets.
• Take a walk round the neighborhood and count stuff like trees, cars, houses etc….
• Make flowers out of colored tissue paper. Here’s a video to show you how.

There are lots of things children can do, so don’t just let them sit in front of the television. What are some things that you do to keep your children away from the television?

I came across a cool website that allows you to create very artistic word clouds like the one I did above. You can either type in your own words or type in the website that you want them to pull the words from.

So, why do I think this is cool? I figured that it can be used as an interesting education tool.

1. You can use it to introduce new words to your children (build up their vocabulary). For example, if you are teaching your children about Asia, you could create a word cloud on the countries in Asia plus whatever words related to Asia e.g. warm climate, oriental, noodles, spices, beautiful beaches, rice
2. After teaching your children about a certain topic, you can check their understanding by asking them to create a word cloud of words related to the topic. For example, after teaching my son about global warming, I asked him to list all the words that come to his mind related to that theme.

There is a button called “randomize” and every time you click it, it will give you a different word cloud (different style, design, colors, font). You can then print it out for your child.

Try it out. It’s pretty cool. Plus, it will indirectly help your children’s creativity.

Are you a digital scrapbook enthusiast? Or maybe you are thinking of picking up the hobby. Well, then you will be interested to know that you have an opportunity to win a $25 gift certificate from Scrap Girls Boutique.

What do you need to do?
Very simple really. Just tell them what is your favorite summer-time activity. Then they will choose a winner through the random number generator.

Where do you need to do this?
The contest is on a thread on their messageboard.  So, just click here: MESSAGEBOARD

Good luck!

Oh, forgot to mention that you need to hurry as you need to enter  your comment before Midnight (MDT), Monday, July 19, 2010.
Also, you need to register as a member before you can start posting. Signing up is free and easy. So no worries.

Click this affiliate banner to discover an easy and fast way to do digital scrapbooking!
I use it, love it and so I’m recommending it.

Short homeschooling lesson for my 7 year old son today: Global Warming
Looking through YouTube, I found this video to be the best in explaining to my son what is Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect. We should teach our children what’s happening to our environment.

Almost all parents take their children’s education seriously. However, different parents have different ideas on how to educate their children. For example, some parents believe that children should be taught to read even when they are babies. Others believe that children will learn to read when they enter preschool or kindergarten. There are also parents that believe there is no rush in teaching children to read. They will read when they are ready.

Here is a very interesting article, titled “Can a child be too young to learn to read?” It was published on Times Online. You know how different schools or governments have different school curriculums for children? Well, in Wales, children get to play until they are 7 years old. Yup, they are following a play-based curriculum. Now some of you probably think, “WHAT? No studying? Just play? How are they going to learn to read?” However, a mother whose 5 year old daughter is going through the system has only good things to say about it. She says her daughter is stimulated and enjoys school. Apart from outdoor play, there are also opportunities to read. I like that idea. I believe before you can teach a child to read, you must first instill the love for learning and then surround them with books.

I also want to point out in that article, a quote by Prof. Pamela Sammons. She’s with Department of Education at the University of Oxford. She says that you can make reading fun, for example you can play with letter sounds, nursery rhymes and songs. It’s funny how we parents always think that fun and learning cannot co-exist. In actual fact, children learn best when they are having fun, not sitting down quietly on a table doing rote learning.

As for me, I try to read a lot to my kids, starting when the are babies. When I go to church, I bring books to keep the occupied instead of toys. I also sing a lot of nursery rhymes. Instead of teaching them A-B-C, I teach them the sounds first: /a/ /b/ /c/. I guess you can say I work on building their phonemic awareness. This makes things easier when I start teaching them phonics when they are about 3-5 years old. I find that my kids’ ability to blend sounds only begin about 4-5 years old. Before that the focus is on learning beginning sounds.

So far, my kids don’t “rebel” or show disinterest when I teach them to read. Of course I follow their lead too. If I’m teaching and they show disinterest, I stop. If you ask me what is the best age to start teaching your child to read, I would say that depends on your child. My approach is to surround them with opportunities to learn to read and when they are interested, teach them. My 3 year old son right now would take books and ask me “what is this word?”. Obviously, it’s a sign that he wants to read. So, I am now teaching him some phonics and also recognizing high frequency words. Even though he has shown interest in learning to read, play is still his #1 learning tool. At his age, teaching sessions are about 10-15 minutes. Since I’m not the most highly organized person, these teaching sessions are quite impromptu.

So what is your idea of the best way and age a child should start learning to read? What are some things you have done to get your child reading? Should children start learning to read early? If you start too late, will that have negative consequences later on? Do you think playing too much is detrimental to their learning? Do share your thoughts.

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School holidays and bored kids at home… that combination is a nightmare to some parents. Well, here is a suggestion… get them to learn how to draw manga.

I was around the net the other day and came across someone’s manga avatar. I thought it would be cool to have one too. Searching around for a site where I could make one, I landed at the Avatar Face Maker. As I was contemplating which cute hairdo I wanted, it occurred to me that this was a great resource to help improve my children’s drawing skills. It was a good way to show them how a face can be drawn in many different ways. I’m not very good at drawing, so this actually helped me too

I went to YouTube to see what they had on manga drawings and found this guy called Mark Crilley to be really educational. He has many videos on how to draw manga. Even though me and my kids’ manga faces still look kinda mangled, it was really inspiring to see how he easily drew those manga characters.

If your kids really like doing this, why not invest in this book: Kids Draw Big Book of Everything Manga

Anyway, just thought I’d share with you this fun activity.

p.s. This activity is more suited towards older children, probably around 6 years and up.