I'm a full-time mummy

For those who wonders what is copywork? It is actually a reproduction of an original work. In our case, I got our 6 years old boy to copy out a sentence that I wrote on his exercise book. I started doing that for his Chinese language homework he got from his kindy class - to practise writing his name in Chinese and during school holidays, I continued writing single sentences in English and let him do the copywork right after he woke up, brushes his teeth and waiting for his breakfast.

According to this article:

"The purpose of copywork is to get into the child’s visual (and motor) memory the look and feel of a sentence that is corrrectly composed, and properly spelled, spaced, and punctuated."

The idea of doing bible verse copywork came from my sister in law. She shared how her kiddos are doing the same, every morning after waking up, her children will copy a verse (when they first started - now at age 10 they are writing by page everyday) from the bible. She shared the many benefits from doing this with her kiddos:

- intimacy with the Word of God

- good English learning

- careful copying

- handwriting exercise

- spelling development

So, with that in mind, I want our kiddos to follow in the footsteps too!

I googled around for templates to print out (no time to design my own for now but I hope to design myself in future, that way I can customise according to our kiddos). What I did with the free template was I wrote out the sentences to copy (1 bible verse and 1 is where the verse is from) then get our 6 years old to copy twice. First time is follow the dotted letters and the second time is to repeat without any dotted guides. In the box on upper portion, I told him to doodle or write or draw whatever on his mind that he thinks represents the bible verse. Am loving this idea as I get to learn and remember as well!

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Took a few tries to get this shot... I just dropped off our oldest kiddo at his kindy and since the weather was lovely, I took our girls to the park nearby and let them play for a while. The sun was shining and seeing their shadows cast on the ground, I decided to take advantage of the teaching and learning moment to try to teach our girls (especially our 3.5 years old Alyson since she can understand better nowadays) on the topic of shadows.

I got her attention by telling her to look on the floor and with my shadow, I showed to her how our shadow can still touch each other, giving high fives, tickles, and more. When she swings further away, her shadow grew longer while it grows nearer and bigger as she swings closer.

They enjoyed seeing their shadows and was amazed with the shadow sizes and lengths as their distance varied while on the swing. Fun!

** 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.

During the recent Chinese New Year holidays, we went to Farm in the City (FITC) and we brought along a niece and a nephew with us. Our 3 kiddos love spending time with their cousins so we asked for our brother and sister in law's permissions to kidnap their 2 youngest kiddos so that we can bring them along with our family outing hahaha... 

We left from our place at 9-ish in the morning and arrived at our destination at 10.30am. Because it was still CNY holiday, there are lots of parking space available and very little crowd as well. Staff waited at the reception and greeted us with a warm welcome. We were ushered to the counter to purchase our family package tickets (RM109 for 2 adults and 2 children below 12 years old, free 2 pony ride for children)

Once we put on our sticker tag onto our wrists, we headed into the farm. Pictures below are some of the snapshots taken during our outing. Feeding giant tortoise, rabbits, guinea pigs, catching fishes, holding baby chicks, standing on ostrich egg, feeding birds, goats, fishes and many more, this place is fun! All 5 kiddos are excited and happily enjoying themselves!

Our nephew told hubby that he can stay on until 6pm (that's when the farm closes) but 2 adults with 5 kiddos, we can only managed to hang around the farm until almost 5pm. We were very tired and ran out of water supply LOL, left the farm happily and very satisfied and capped off the outing with a small tea break McDonalds treat.

Some proud mummy moments during the outing were:

• Our 3 kiddos braving themselves to touch and feed some farm animals (tortoises, monkeys, birds, goats, baby chicks)

• Watching our kiddos catching small fishes at the drains near the rabbits and guinea pigs petting area. They were so happy when they caught the fishes (which were released back unharm after that)
  

To sum up our review on Farm in the City (FITC):

PLUS POINTS:

• Reasonable entrance fees 

• Up close encounter with farm animals

• Lots of rest areas with benches and tables and shelters

• Lots of washing areas with proper sink (even child-friendly sinks) and handwash liquid for you to wash your hands after touching, petting or feeding the farm animals

• Stroller-friendly walkways

• Food to feed farm animals are FREE and provided by staff stationed at the enclosures.

• Friendly and helpful staff

• Refreshment areas are clean up promptly
  

• Lots of teaching and learning monents for kiddos - habitats, features, feeding, life cycles of farm animals, trees and plants.
  

BAD POINTS:

• I was not able to get to the fruits/plants area as there is no stroller path going down so I ended up resting at a picnic table at the archway of the fruits/plants area with our 1.5 year old toddler who is napping that time.
  

Definitely worth going back to again and again! Totally recommended!

** 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.