To-Do List, E-Learning & Keyboard Typing

Date:  Jan 18, 2016

Kids in Primary School is different from kids in Kindergarten.

For example, Kay Kay in P1 has a lot of time in the afternoon.  We have to figure out a way to help him fill up the time.

We have to find a way to teach Kay Kay to be self- discipline too.

So, To-Do Check List become an important part of Kay Kay.  

We enrolled some enrichment class such as CMA (Abacus & Mental Calculations) and BrainFit (Focus learning and languages), both aren’t exactly MOE related courses.  There are homework, and some e-learning resources.  

So, let’s take a look at Kay Kay’s first ever to-do list.

1.  We requested him to do his CMA homework.  

2.  We requested him to do his day to day Braind Fit exercise on the Computer.

3.  Of course, if they perform the tasks well, they can play board game or ii (another word of iPad in the house).

4.  Telling him when will we be in bed.

Once done, place a tick beside.

So, we going to do this every day.  And we are going to put in more E-Learning resources, Weekly Spelling and 听写 self-learning.  Even reading story book too.  As he is still P1.  So, let him play Lego, or any of his toys.  I also bought a Lego Wedo Robotics for him, and he will get to make robots every day too.  I also have a keyboard typing lesson in place.

We started with Jay Jay too back in 2013.  And it has done a good job.  By P2, he no longer need the To-Do list.  He will calculate all this time in a day, and plan his day to do the home work.  We are so glad that Jay even do his home work at school so that he can come home and attend those extra sports classes that he likes.

So, on this first week of school week, we did the to-do list for Jay Jay as well just to SHOW kay kay how much work his brother has to do.

So that Kay Kay can appreciate that his to-do list is not so scary.  Hahahahaha

There are a lot of E-learning resources.  For example the school provided MC Online for the kids.  And the students can learn English, Math and Chinese from it.

Oh ya, first of all, I must declare, I don’t play games on my PC.  So the children don’t see daddy or mommy play games on PC be it iMac or Windows PC.

I very seldom play games in from of my kids.

As I know Monkey See Monkey Do.

I do play games on iPad.  But only when I am together with them.  We played together.

I do play games on my TV either on Apple TV or Amazon Fire TV or even Xbox or Wii.  

But during schooling time, we don’t play TV Console games at all.  Only play the TV Console games when we have guests.

Also, I don’t watch Youtube in front of the kids too.

In fact, when the kids is around, I seldom use my iPhone too.  Only use it as taking photo or some messages arrived.

There is a purpose of doing so.

I want my kids to know and understand the following…

1) PC / Computer is for work, and it is not for gaming.

2) Mobile phones is for work, phone and messaging and as a camera.

3) iPad is for Games as well as learning tool.

4) In this house, if the kid ask for playing iPad they will get caned.  (no joke).  They cannot even mentioned the name “iPad”.  So, they invented another name for it, namely “ii”.  But they know if they behaves well, they done what parents ask them to do, they are rewarded with “iPad” time.

Rewarding systems is very important.  I reward them by taking them out, by letting them play iPad, by buying lots of toys they loved.  Most importantly they have to become a self-motivated kid who knows how to do homework, and know study is important to them.  That is what I need especially for a family that has both daddy and mommy working.

Expose them to so many things so that they sometimes will say “Daddy, I don’t want to play ii (iPad) can you teach me Ukulele?”

or “Daddy, I don’t want to play ii (iPad), can you play Otello with me, I just learned this game by watching other people play in school today.”

A kids who cares and willing to help parents to do work in the garden.

A kids who really know how to survive when they grow up, not scare of worms and able to pick up the 锄头.

Let’s get back to the E-Learning platform the school has for the kid.

I am teaching him that E-learning on MC Online is not only see and learn.  You got to keep notes.  

Yeah!  I make no mistake now.  I didn’t teach Jay Jay well enough during his P1 days.  

For Kay Kay, I am not taking any chances especially in building his learning skills during P1 time.

So, I taught him that he needs to start keeping notes.  So that he can refer to the notes from time to time.

I think he did great in here.  And at the same time, he can choose to learn the vocabs or wait until later.

Penmanship is very important too.

I teach him to write down notes so that he can write correctly, write faster.

I didn’t pay so much attention while Jay Jay in P1.  But I do realised that Jay was a bit weak with his penmanship last time.  

So, again, whatever mistakes we make before shall not happen to this new kid in P1.  How fortunate. 

Kay Kay has been taking his Brain Fit E-lessons or Games for almost a year.  So he is very familiar with this sort of E-learning platform.

And he likes it.

Next is the typewriting.

Strange enough that the school do not have lessons to teach kids how to type.

The biggest mistakes I think from MOE.

They introduce E-Learning and without introducing Keyboard typewriting.

How many times I see kids struggle in this.

And how many times I see kids use two fingers to type and they sure can type very fast with two fingers.

But unfortunately, that’s wrong.

So for my kids, they will get proper type writing learning programs.

This is what I bought for both Jay (Windows 10) and Kay (iMac).

I found it pretty cool to learn it the kids way.

It trains them concentration.  Focus.

They must place their fingers correctly on to the keyboard.

The aim is to increase their WPM (Word per minute) and the Accuracy.

There are different types of games they can play too.  By all to do with typing.

The two brothers some time can compete with each other too.

So I really hope that both of them can learn the typing well. Because after that, learning how to do simple programming will be the next steps.

See how I am going to turn them into Computer nerds.  hahahahaha

I am so glad to see how Jay Jay has learned how to use the flash cards to learn his spelling.  hahaha

Kay Kay felt excited to learn the Chinese on MC Online platform.

Hey, do you notice it?  The fingers.

Yeah, ten fingers on the keyboard.  The correct way of typing.  hahaha

Good luck in teaching your kids.  

May the force be with you!

2016 Target - Self Learning

Date:  Jan 16, 2016

In school, teacher’s job is to teach the students knowledge.

At home, I think parent’s job is to teach the kid to become independent.

Yeah!  No longer I need to produce the flash card for Jay Jay.

Starting this year, he has to do his own flash cards.

Me and him agreed that flash cards for learning Chinese is useful.

So, this year, we are going to continue using this method not only to learn Chinese, he will write down study notes for Science and English on the flash cards too.

At the same time, I can teach him penmanship.  Like write the Chinese word in the centre.  

Use the Chinese brush to write.

Slowly increase the strength on the strokes.

This kind of opportunity is very rare and I felt I need Jay Jay to learn it.

For the Chinese one is very simple.  Simply write down the 必读字 and 笔写字 from the text book.  

I also made Kay Kay to stick around to see what his brother is learning and doing.  The same thing will apply to him 2-3 years later.

I also have a chance to teach him all other things.  Such as

大西洋, 太平洋, 印度洋, etc.  Some of the Oceans names.

航海 VS 航空.  Where can you use some of the characters.

His spelling list.  One of the benefit is you can always bring out the cards again to revise.  Instead of looking at the boring spelling list paper.  

You can shuffle the cards so you always have a different orders of the spelling list.

He further improve this.  By writing another card that has words he first time learned and can’t remember.  (the yellow one).

So, he is now learning more and more self learning tools to make him learn things on his own at his own pace.

So far we are very please with his own self learning ability.  We don’t have to tell him what to do, he will finish his homework promptly without reminding him.

He is actually very proud of this.  :)

Kids Show & Tell

Date:  May 18, 2015

Don’t under estimate the power of “Show & Tell”.

This is where you train your kids to become daring, speak in front of the class, with something that they are very proud of making.

Since mommy is flying off to US this week, so, daddy comes in to help Kay with his homework.

Angler Fish, hmmm… what is that?

Even I don’t know what is an Angler fish.

Therefore, we google it.  

Eweee… what an ugly fish.

It is the fish with sharp teeth and a lamp on their head.

Have the kids seen it before?

Oh yeah… definitely. 

In “Finding Nemo”, Nemo’s daddy swim with Dory to find Nemo.. and they encountered some a sea monster.  

It’s an Angler Fish!

Sometime kids are funny cute human beings.  They need to see cartoons to relate it to the real thing.

So, if this creature happened to appeared in any cartoon, they will instantly remember.  If not, let’s watch the cartoon again to try to recall it.

Can the kids draw it?

The characteristics of an Angler fish is actually the big fat body, with sharp teeth and a hanging lamp/light in front of their forehead.

It can be easily drawn.

Kids will love it.

Can it be coloured?

Of course, yes!

Any colour will do.  Make sure outline the sharp teeth and a hanging lamp.

To have a better show and tell, kids will need to make their own props.

And make sure you use used chocolate box, i.e. Oreo box to make it.

Reuse - reduce & recycle.  This is what kids always learn from the pre-school, so, always you will need to strengthen the concepts.

These hinges are very useful indeed.

You don’t know when you going to use it. 

But one day, you will need it!

Father and son conceptualise this and use the hinge to make a moving mouth.

A moving mouth with sharp teeth.

Very sharp indeed.

We even make a simple Fish home for the Angler fish.  It is a cave.

It is very dark.

So, they can use their lamp in the head to light up the cave.

Very dark inside.

A very simple Angler fish.

With sharp green teeth.

with moving lamp at the forehead.

With moving tails to swim fast.

With black eye.

And a yellow fin.

This is Kay Kay’s small little props for the show and tell.

I am very sure he will have lots of things to talk about.

And this fish stay in the cave.

Very dark cave.

And when he lights up the lamp, the cave becomes brighter.

And the small little fishes will swim towards the light.

And Mr. Angler Fish will “Amb…” eat all the small little fishes with his sharp green teeth.

A 30 minutes time to do the project with the kid and make them feel good.

Feel proud.

and Feel wanting to give the show and tell.

So much to talk about.

A happy Kay.

Learn Chinese Compositions

Date:  May 4, 2015

“May the 4th be with you!"

Last week, I posted a very interesting method of learning Chinese.

Last week article.  http://miniliew.blogspot.sg/2015/04/date-apr-26-2015-i-would-love-that-my.html

This week, I wanted to tell you why it is useful.  It was meant for Oral test and reading.  

But today I find that it is useful for doing Chinese Composition Writings too.

Students are allowed to bring electronic dictionary into the class to take the Chinese paper 1.  Which is Chinese Composition writing.

If you don’t know how to write the words or phrases, don’t worry, simply type the Han Yu Pin Yin will do.

For example “Zhi Dao” is ”知道“.

Even they are not sure about the correct Han Yu Pin Yin, they can simply type “zd”, which is the first alphabet for Zhi and the first alphabet of Dao.  And then, you just scroll to the words you want. 

But how does the kid know how to read the words they wanted to write?  So that they can key in the Han Yu Pin Yin?

Unfortunately, there is no easy way.  You have to READ MORE and LEARN MORE.

The more you read, the more that you will learn and use the Chinese words.  If you seldom read, then, you will definitely don’t know how to search and write.

I started to use this Oral test assessment book.

Inside has 15 passages.  This is one of them.

Next, I start to read the story books.  

I would say these story books has about 75% of the vacabs that Jay knows how to read.  There are 25% still he does not know how to pronounce.

So, what I did is to record down my voice reading the story.

Then, every morning or day, I will ask him to listen to the recording and eyes look at the passage.  Read it inside his mind, not reading out loud.  

The more he read the books, the more he will hear my voice.  It is also a very familiar voice.  So, it felt natural for him to read the story book this way.

It is kind of like an audiobook.  :)  Here is the sample of my voice.  hahahaha

So, the more he read, the more he understand the usage of the the Chinese words and sentences.

The more he read, the more he will remember.

Usually, takes about 5-7 days to read one passage or a story.

There will be a lot of words he had not seen before.

But because he is reading it, he remember it subconsciously.

Because he remember how it was pronounce, he is able to tell what is the Han Yu Pin Yin.

Because he has seen the words before, when he key the Han Yu Pin Yin, he is able to select the correct words and learn how to write them.

So far the result has been good.

Lastly, I want to share with you this passage.  Telling why we need to teach our kids to read.

Don’t worry, it not only apply to Mommy, also apply to Daddy.

Confident look, confident writing.  May the force be with you.