Friday last week...

Nate had his portfolio day, which meant we only needed to be in school at 10:30. So the boys stayed home and I took them to the supermarket. There we found some water bomb balloons and made a bunch.

The kids built a farm in the corner of their class room.

I had planned earlier with Yang Ping (Pasquale's mom) to go to the Science Center after the portfolio review so this is Nate in the big nose (acting as snot) and him on the big big tongue. As a side thought I am wondering whether I should bring Ike to a speech therapist?

Here's my new tomato patch. Today I also sent an email to the guys who sell the veggie boxes to see the weight. Am tempted to have them send one over. Otherwise maybe I will lug it back from our SA trip in November. I used the first batch of compost from my composter though the garderner recently added mango leaves which had not quite broken down yet. I had him dig a patch for the sun flower shoots that are coming up nicely as well.

Spoke to Vini today, she said they had a big crop of radish, the only crop that did well in her garden so far.

Video Clip : Ike and his tractor

I think this was Dec 2007. Note his funny crawl.

Ike's report card

ok the video is from SA... prob 9 months ago but since I seem to be having success posting video clips, I thought I'd post it here.

Comments from English Teacher:
Ike is a quiet and sensitive little boy who has a kind and caring personality. His friendly and gentle nature has made him some good friends and in particular enjoys playing with Jonas. They can often be seen in the playground chasing each other or hanging on the monkey bars.

Ike finds it difficult to interact with the older children adn prefers to play with Jonas or by himself. he will happily join Yuyu for classroom activities where she will assist him with his work. He is becoming a little more confident in the classroom, class assemblies and school events but would still prefer an observational role than participate. His listening skills are developing and he is able to follow instructions and complete tasks with assistance.

Ike has produced some lovely assisted work in his Portfolio and I think he is very proud to see how much he has achieved in this semester. I am sure as Ike matures, he will enjoy participating more within the classroom and as a result, his confidence will grow.

Comments from the Chinese Teacher:
During this semester, Mingming has made tremendous improvement and has reaped some rewards in Chinese, he is now able to enjoy the activities and time spent during Chinese class.

Ike has been greeting me in Chinese everyday this semester, under his teacher's encouragement, he is now able to speak a few simple chinese words and describe things. He has made some improvement in his expression too. He has also made improvements in listening and understanding skills. He knows "wash your hands", "line up", "drink water" etc and can use simple sentences to reply to questions I asked, eg. "my name is mingming, I am 3 years old".

Considering that this child has made significant progress, I suggest to the parent to continuosly expose the child to Chinese as much as possible.

... and hence mommy suffers with liangzi laohu song in the car every day!! and an hour of chinese songs and phrases when the kids are in the car. At night sometimes I hear the Shaolin temple song being played!!!

Nate at his first week in Chinese class - BLUR -, in fact he fell asleep in day one of chinese class.



Nate at mid term - LIP SYNCHING -



Nate at end of term - SINGING!! -

Nate's report card

Nate's report card is quite good, I"ll try and also upload the video of him in chinese class, from the first week, mid term and at the end of term...

So Nate's report card is quite good, with more than 80% the teachers score him (on 60 areas like able to understand chinese instructions, able to understand xyz concepts", "applies knowledge to real life situtaion", "engages in conversation with peers and adults", " works independently when required" etc... on the "surpassing expectation" box. about 20% in the "meets expectation" and one dot in the "progressing towards expectation", which is "interest in chinese character and able to master some characters", well that is sorted now as I have changed all his memory cards with chinese characters, he now recognizes more than 20.

Ike on the other hand, has scored entirely in the 3rd box, ie "progressing towards expectations". In hindsight I wonder if this was the right school for him as he was a bit young to join age wise and probably maturity wise.

Nate's english and chinese teacher wrote this:
Nate has been displaying good manners and good behavior towards others. He has been socially active and constantly initiates interactions with classmates. He may be a bit playful at times but behaves when asked to. He is happily settled in school and is willing to learn new things.

During the semester, Nate has shown improvement in learning Chinese. He has a long attention span and is able to quickly remember Chinese songs, vocab, poems, and nursery rhymes. He has been expressive of his feelings in singing songs, poems and rhymes. He likes to listen to Chinese stories and is able to remember the main characters in the story. He is able to quickly answer questions about the stories read in class.

The teachers also said his math ability is very good. Will do ike's report in next blog. getting ready to head out now.

Nate's evaluation

I had a long chat with the coordinator of the school, apparently since we arrived mid term, we weren't given the orientation package etc. But insists the desemination of information will be better next year. She also showed me the written evaluation they have for ike which will be handed out to parents soon.

I sat with Nate's english teacher and chinese teacher.... Although nate joined mid year he caught up well (wonder if he needs a more challenging peer group?). Both say his math and memory are really good. His chinese teacher showed me 3 video clips, clip one, early stage in chinese class, he looked really blur (apparently first day of class he even fell asleep), second clip, nate was doing the lip sync and third clip, he could verbalise every word while playing london bridge.

The chinese teacher also commented how she was so proud of him at his snowman recital. He performed even better than all the rehersals and was not afraid at all. His classmate pasquale who was a bit scared with the crowd watching, asked for nate to recite with him a song about autumn, the teacher asked nate if he remembered the words and he said yes, so he went up with pasquale and stole his show.

She said his logic and math is extremely good and gave me a good idea... we came home, I used all the old name cards fm south africa (recycling!) and made them into memory cards with chinese words from his school like dong fang i tiao long (a dragon from the east), his name and many new words.... he can recognise them!!! bubbi, we will be playing memory by the beach but the cards are of chinese characters, talk about handicapping!

Grrrr-oooo-vy

Well actually I think they look a bit scary like that really rich, sleazy and old playboy in HK that wore similar shades.

So someone came and stole loren's bike from our porch! Luckily 2 weeks ago I insured the household contents and we will be able to claim back from insurance, what was great also was I could do the entire report online and a policeman called me at home to verify a few facts.

We had a nice dada's days with friends over for brunch and pool. Pictures are posted on loren's facebook, must go hijack the photo's.

Am debating whether I should book all the spots we want to stay along the east coast drive trip holiday ore maybe just the first 3 spots and then see how the flow goes, its anyway low season. hmm hmm hmmmm.

Ike's school evaluation

Here is a panda painting by ike. The school evaluation system I feel here is not as thorough as Broadacres. They do not even have categories that tell me whether his gross motor skills, fine motor skills, speech, social etc. are at peer standards or not. I think he is absorbing stuff, he sings little songs now and has really started to talk alot at home although the teachers say in school he whispers and talks really quietly. Everything he does is still teacher assisted. Overall he is happy at school and maybe he is a tad young for his class so he is not really applying himself.

Nate's evaluation is next week.

Our trip to Chengdu is cancelled, mainly because of the Swine Flu. China does not have the facilities for a big outbreak and we may all get home quarantined upon arrival which would suck. So the plan change is to now drive up the east coast of Malaysia. It is turtle season, so there is a good chance we will see turtles coming to the beach to lay eggs and a hatchery. Also we will get to visit a Kelong (fishing home on stilts), local markets, one of the last few pristine ancient jungles (the worlds largest flower or maybe bud if it has not opened), elephants and nice nice beaches with snorkelling. Then we'll hit the east west highway, get to penang then to KL and back. Maybe do the west coast another time with bubs.

The Luge, Sentosa Island

I need to remember to go explore the Barrage with the boys, its the city reservoir where kids can play in shallow water with fountains as well.

The treetop view of a strange plant that had red flowers or fruit like the pinang used in Malay celebrations.
After the ice cream we head to the Luge, which is a "niu niu qe" type race buggy from new zealand, no picture of the actual vehicle here as I was driving with ike. Nate is still a tad young to do it alone, maybe on a quieter day with Kenneth but before getting there, one can either climb up the hill to get ot the launch pad or take the ski lift, which we did, was a bit scary as its open air and above the tree tops. Not like a ski hill where everything is white and snowy, one can't estimate how high one really is, here we could see and know how high we are. Ike was really trying hard to be as brave as he can.

They did enjoy the luge downhill! its quite popular that the owner said they have had no drop in customers and are building a new track!

Sentosa Island

in the morning is really nice, we got there at 8, cool morning sun, the boys played in gentle waves, I should have brought a magazine. There was a guy there with a metal detector and when we left at about 10 he must have picked up at least 30 pieces of jewelry under the sand! Mainly rings. Am glad I have reinsured my jewelry here and one less worry wearing them though I should be getting the settings rechecked.

After the beach, the boys washed off the salt water at these little fountains and as it was getting hot we got an ice cream. Ike not even coming up for air!

Zeda in Singapore

Zeda brought lots of toys... oh this first image has nothing to do with zeda but I saw it as an ad, quite a cute baby relaxing in a hot tub.

Zeda did lots of swimming with the kids and even went to nate and ike's little school performance (had to sit thru alot of speech contestants speaking in chinese before getting to the boy's performance part. Here is Nate with his song of the snowman which went something like this:

snowman, snowman
what a cute figure you have
no need for winter coat, no need for hat
then he says something which I can't quite make out...

Zeda now on a cruise to vietnam, hk, KK.... for 2 weeks. Back for more singapore sauna treatement... It had been hot the whole week with no rain and at last it rained today.

Here is a sculpture of a skinny snowman at vivocity, where we dropped zeda, had sushi then ben and jerrys. Ike calls this the kinny noman.

Amphibian vehicle, zoo and science center

Every afternoon we went out on an excursion, the weather has been really hot, the predictions of rain have not come true and yesterday we hit 35 degrees. There was some breeze on the amphibian vehicle that took us on a tour on land then in the singapore river.

At the zoo, they cooled off at the water park. Han was very enthusiastic until he saw the BIG bucket of water pour down, then he hid the whole time behind the glass panel of KFC looking out to the water park. Finally yesterday at the science center water park there was no scary big bucket of water did they all have a good time together. Ambu is what Wei calls bullet.

Birthday party and Barney Live show

The cousins from KL, Han and Wei were supposed to arrive on Saturday at around 3pm but because it was a public holiday in Malaysia, there was a lot of traffic traveling down from KL to Melaka, they arrived in Singapore after a 7 hour drive (usually 4 to 5) at 5pm. In the meantime, Nate went to Yannik's birthday party, hit his first pinata and played in a indoor play area near our home.

The next day we took the boys to watch their first concert.... Barney live with Bob the builder made an appearance.

Dino puppet show

I didn't get a chance to take pics of the dinosaurs but here is the backdrop, a theatre filled with straw and then the narrator introduced the plants of the dino era, giant asparagus like plants and moss that grew to tree size. The first dino that came out was a friendly anklyosaur, kids sat right at the edge of the performance area. The poor puppeteer was inside on all fours but it looked realistic enough that nate still thinks its real. The next baby dino's were brought out by two puppeteers with slings. After a few more, the finale was a huge big snorting one with sharp teeth, a smaller relative of the T-Rex, but it looked scary, This one we could see the legs of the puppeteer but still it was quite realistic esp. when it could interact with the audience, like coming over to try and eat the kids that stood up on their seats (nate...).

After the show, we went impromptu to the beach at the east coast. The boys running off into the ocean with the swimming trunks. Grace and I got nice big sugar cane juice.

The new History Museum

is now the National Museum of Singapore, their renovation is done very well with lots of interactive play area for the kids. We went with Grace and Kenneth to see the dinosaur show which was great. Its all large puppets, very cleverly done. Nate still believes the smaller dinosaurs are real.

another A&E visit...

I had a great day planned for myself as the kids were on a school field trip to the zoo. I wanted to go shopping and as I stepped into the first store, I get a call from Ike's teacher saying he has cut his chin. So I had to go pick him up from the zoo and head to the hospital. Ike was a brave boy. Only upset when he saw the dr. This time no need stitches as its a small but deep cut. Mama didn't help out the economy at all this time.