Week 8/52

Chinese New Year
This week was about preparing for Chinese New Year. It’s always a big affair here in Singapore. After being away for 3 years, I have come to better appreciate the fanfare that comes with all the New Year festivities.

So this week, we took a short bus trip to a nursery nearby our place, in hope of buying a bunch of pussy willow and a pot of flowers to adorn our doorway. We were quite overwhelmed!

Among small mandarin trees grown for Chinese New Year signifying good luck.

Preparing the stalks of pussy willow and curly bamboo for the girls to arrange and decorate with red ribbons and ornaments.

Drawing and making fish or decorations for the arrangement

Forming a word 羊 with red packets

Decorating with angbao fish

Daily watering of the pot of flowers we choose. Alas, it is not doing well at this point of time despite all the watering and sun.

Outdoors
This week we also tried going to the playground in the morning instead of our usual afternoon outdoor time. This is the big playground as we call it. Other playgrounds around our areas are called the “downstairs playground” and the “child care playground”. No prizes for guessing where they are in relation to where we stay.

This climbing rope gets crossed countless times!

Finding their shady spot to chat and sketch

We stopped for morning tea and a chapter of read-aloud from the Burgess Bird Book. The birds are not those we see in Singapore but it is a lovely book to learn about how and where birds make their nests, their typical calls and their colours that identify them. We still love it for learning about birds and listening to their calls. The girls get quite good at imitating the bird calls…like the really loud cockatoos last time and recently we identified the call of the the Black-Banded Oriole.

After that it was time to make our way back and a quick 15 minute search for pretty leaves and flowers for our nature collage.

Looking for something to pick up in our nature stash

The common and beautiful hibiscus.

Nature Study
I have been pushing for her to sketch like we used to when we came back but it didn’t quite work out and she didn’t have much interest. So I didn’t quite know what to do for our outdoor time. I didn’t particularly like the tropical natural environment as much and the girls has an aversion to ants, millipedes and any crawling insect. We pretty much went out to the playgrounds and pointed out anything interesting, if there is any.
I didn’t have much expectations for this activity as we have done similar ones last time. The agenda was just to paste them on the contact paper and we will hang it up. That’s it. The girls thoroughly enjoyed putting together the collage. We got to talk about the names of the plants. Later on, we got to read up on creepers and climbers, as well as how their tendrils help them climb from the DK Eyewitness Plant book. Finally that book is becoming useful. It was beginning to feel a little like an encyclopaedia and quite a dry read….not till something related like this came along.

They had their bag of nature poured on trays, ready to be arranged on the contact paper.

Pressing delicate petals on the contact paper.

Elizas nature collage

Trying to use the shape hole punchers on the leaves

Learning
I am still not consistent with planning things for Emily, and it is mostly what I get inspired with. This week I did some planning from Hubbard’s Cupboard for 3 year olds. We did some craft activities, learnt new songs, sang bible memory verse songs and did the days of creation.