Tardy me

I have been a bit tardy in taking pictures of the boys... my handphone camera has more images of land where the school is looking to start a garden for the kids and so I have been busy figuring out how the garden could look like. I just want to move ahead but I wonder if at the schools pace we are going to get anything done at all?

Here is an image of the compost heap I started at vini's place 6 months ago, she filled it and recently opened it and voila, lovely lovely compost, so I am going to try and do that at the school.

I spoke to Nate's chinese teacher today and am quite pleased with his progress. Next year (if he stays in this school), he can go to the advanced chinese class. He has also been taking on a new attitude to learning to write chinese characters and for english he is starting to put alphabets together for words, his memory works in his favour and can do tang poems as well, though i need to start him on several new ones.

The responses I heard from the PTA basically summarizes that if your child gets into the advanced chinese stream, they will follow the Beijing curriculum and they will have homework but all China parents are happy with their children's progress in that stream. The mid and lower streams... the parents are not too pleased that the children cannot work towards getting into the higher stream. Some parents do not want homework for their kids and it was nice hearing other parents say, if you want your child to learn chinese, there is no other way. The school juggles alot for the kids and maybe at the expense of other areas, like a healthier canteen.

Ike also has a good memory and can do the poems but because it seems the second child syndrome is already setting in. He wants to not compete in the area where Nate is better in. Hmmm....