I'm a full-time mummy

My current goal in educating our kiddos is to instill their love for reading, do loads of flash cards and worksheets on spelling and writing and hopefully more practice and worksheets on Mathematics stuff later on. Now I'm really not a fan of water colors stuff. Or doing paper glue crafts. Or using blackboard with chalks stuff. The OCD-ness in me just can't stand the mess, the stickiness, the dust. Not at their young age. Maybe later. But now, I personally feel white board is the best for our kiddos.

I bought 2 units of white board for our older 2 kiddos. Each white board came with a dry erase marker pen and a duster. The size is appropriate enough for them at the moment.

I like the convenience of teaching them by drawing or writing out and show them and then erase it and let them write on their own. I do use exercise books from time to time but this was done after the practise on the white board. Perhaps the stingy frugal side of me do not want to simply waste papers as well LOL.

I also like the convenience part where I can easily bring the white board along should we decide to go out for some playground time and subtly making it into a learning moment haha. 

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I know, I know... it is weird. I mean, how often do you hear parents saying they read news articles instead of storybooks for their kiddos' bedtime stories right? So let me be the weird one to tell you that. Yes, I read news articles to our kiddos before their bedtime.

I can't even remember how we get to this point. I think probably one of those nights when the kiddos refused to sleep (btw, we all co-sleep on 2 huge mattresses) and I was so tired that I just turned on my iPhone and started browsing through my usual newsfeed channels searching for interesting stuff to read. And then our oldest kiddo asked me what was I reading and I explained and told him about the news I was reading. One thing lead to another, I started reading news article for their bedtime stories. I like that I don't need to turn on the room's light and hold up a book to read to all 3 kiddos LOL

So much that every night the standard statement from our 6 year old boy was 'Mummy, after this we brush teeth then get ready for sleep but before that you read news okay?' Okayyyyy...

Of course, I filter the heavy more serious type of news (politics for example), so those that I normally share with our kiddos are news like below:

I also shared the same articles on my FB page as well from time to time. I believe that knowledge is key and never harm anyone if we read up more and know more. And since I am reading out loud to our kiddos, I hope they can learn to listen the proper pronounciation apart from learning about things around them.

I was happy when I came across this article on what reading aloud to your children does to their brain. Excerpt from article below:

"When parents read to their children the difference shows in children's behavior and academic performance. And according to a new study, the difference also shows in their brain activity.

Researchers looked at children ages 3 to 5 who underwent brain scans called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to a pre-recorded story. The parents answered questions about how much they read to, and communicated with, their children.

The researchers saw that, when the young children were being told a story, a number of regions in the left part of the brain became active. These are the areas involved in understanding the meaning of words and concepts and also in memory. These same brain regions have been found to be active when older children listen to stories or read. 

The brain develops rapidly from zero to six years of age, and the more exposure, the more you enrich and nurture these brain networks that are related to social and academic ability, the more the kid will gain the future."

There are benefits of parents reading to their children beyond the child's performance, too. "It's one of the most pleasurable activities that you do with your child -- there's physical closeness but it's probably the most unhurried time that children have with their parent and it is focused on them."

** Note: I have disabled the commenting feature on my blog engine thanks to all the spammers who happily spam my blog every day. If you wish to ask me any questions, you can find me at my Facebook page (I'm there almost everyday) or just drop me an email if you wish to maintain some anonymity.

One of my FB page followers sent me this article which I must definitely share with you guys as I truly wanted everyone, parents especially to take note and do something about this.

Now parents before you view the video, no matter how you think you have talked, discussed, asked, listened, drilled etc your children about stranger danger, please please please monitor their activities, check up on them every now and then as often as you can, be there for them, be the one your child can go to and talk to with ease, spend more time with them. Don't be too confident that your child won't fall into such traps. Just very scary to watch the video and see how easily the girls trust strangers they have never seen face to face.

For your convenience, I have copied some of the excerpts from the article here:

"In this video, YouTuber, Coby Persin, creates a social experiment to show just how dangerous it can be to "friend" a stranger online. With the permission of three teenage girl's parents, he sends the girls a friend request posing as a 15 year old boy who just moved to their town. Not only do these girls accept his request and chat with him, but they also agree to meet up with a complete stranger. The girls parents were shocked to see that their daughters would give out their address and meet up with a stranger -- they didn't believe it was possible! This is something that everyone needs to see. You never know who that 15 year old boy might really be!"

To view the video, just click on the screenshot image below, it will play the video on YouTube in a new window screen.

** Note: I have disabled the commenting feature on my blog engine thanks to all the spammers who happily spam my blog every day. If you wish to ask me any questions, you can find me at my Facebook page (I'm there almost everyday) or just drop me an email if you wish to maintain some anonymity.