How to get your kids involved in Arts & Crafts

The kids love to do Arts and Crafts. We have designated Friday as Arts & Crafts Day this school holiday.

I did make a lot of effort to introduce Art & Craft to them and get them involved to bring out their creativity when they were younger. However, ever since the girl started kindy, we have less time to do them. I haven't updated the Arts and Crafts category on this blog for a long time.

We still have a useful stock of art supplies though. I find it really useful to have Arts and Craft Supplies readily available so we can use them whenever we need.

We have the following in our Arts and Crafts Cupboard:

• Scissors
• Glues
• All sorts of construction papers, colored, cardboard, crepe, thick, thin, transparent
• All sorts of colored pens and pencils and glitter glue and pens
• Stickers
• Glitter dust'
• Ribbons and papers from old hampers
• Recycled wrapping paper
• Play Doh
• Paints and Palletes
• Origami books and papers
• Paper plane books and papers
• Balloon Art pump and balloons plus instructions
• Pencil, rubber, ruler
• Drawing Block

With these basic supply, we can sit down for an arts and crafts project anytime. Today we're making a homemade story book. So we took out our manila cardboard for the cover, folded and cut out the pages of the book and stapled the pages together with the cover to make the book and the rest is up to their imagination.

The girl has been given a project to make a story book called "My School Holidays" and the boy is to make a book called "My ABC 123 Book". The rest is up to their imagination and its wonderful what they can come up with sometimes. I tell them to write, draw, color and decorate with stickers, anything they feel like doing.

I give them a book as an example for what to put on the cover. Eg: Title and Author and how the book should look like. The girl would often call out to me on how to spell a word that she wants to put in her story. Its a fun way of learning instead of asking her to do spelling. This way she learns on her own initiative.

For ideas, sometimes I look at kids' contests, or newspaper pages for kids and of course, the world wide web. Last night the girl couldn't wait for Arts and Crafts Friday so she started her project to draw firemen on a rescue mission, an idea I stole from the newspapers.

Doing Arts and Crafts is a fun way for the kids to learn, keeps them occupied and away from the tv. :)

I wrote this post last week but now its Friday again and time for another Arts & Crafts project! My goodness. Time flies. For today's project, we are going to paint pictures and frame them up in the colourful frames I bought from IKEA about 2 weeks ago. It'll be fun plus it'll make a nice decoration for their playroom.

Are boys lazier than girls?

I'm wondering if boys are lazier than girls. I've had no problems teaching my girl. She loves learning and she soaks up information like a sponge. She has a photographic memory and can often remember shows or books that she reads word for word. Its amazing.

She learned her ABCs almost by herself. I taught her a couple of times and then she would practise by herself and soon she knew them all. We have the whole set of Peter and Jane books and when I teach her to read using them, we would go through book after book till she completed all in the series almost without turning back.

Even now that she is older, she loves home lessons. I can give her some instructions and she would do the work eagerly. All she needs is some reward stickers to make her happy.

Its a different story with my boy though. Whenever I teach him, sometimes he would grumble and say "Tired...." He's learning to read the Peter and Jane books but we can't move on. We keep on going back to books 1 and 2 over and over again because he can't remember.

Last night he threw two of the books that we were currently reading down the bed when I was not looking. I found them because he and his sister were looking under the bed at the numerous toys and other stuff that he threw in there.

When I asked him why he threw the book under his bed, he said he didn't want to read them. So he threw them in there so I couldn't find them! When I told his dad about that, his dad said "Smart boy". Hmmm...... and he is the one who is always asking me to give more attention to the boy and make sure that he is not left behind in his lessons compared to his sister.

What to do now? I don't want to turn him off learning. His dad said he should be pushed a little so that he doesn't take it easy all the time. He hasn't outgrown his mirror image writing so we want to make sure that we spend time teaching him but he is lazy to learn. He is going to be 5 in April 2009. To me he is still a baby and I shouldn't be worried but his paeditrician had wanted to have him screened for dyslexia some months ago when we visited her. Eventually she agreed to wait a few months till he starts school to see his progress. I guess that is why his dad is always asking me to push him a little but I don't want to punish or scold him if he is lazy to learn. I don't want him to learn because he HAS to, I want him to learn because he WANTS to.

Back to School Shopping

This is the first year that I am involved in Back to School Shopping. I am a bit blur.

I saw some school uniforms going for around RM20.90 (just for the pinafore) and got my girl to try it but the material didn't look very fantastic. Then I went to another shop which had very nice cotton material and had better workmanship but that cost RM34.90. Wow! Quite a big price difference. The white blouse cost RM21.90.

Everyone advised us to get bigger sizes so in the end, the girl looks a bit sloppy but we got the big sets anyway hoping that she will grow into them. We got 3 sets each. Hope that will be enough turnover time for it to be washed, dried and ironed daily.

Then we got shoes and socks for both the boy and the girl. We sure had a hard time deciding on the right size as well. However the girl and the boy had a good time prancing around the shoe store. The shoes cost about RM25 each and the socks around RM6 each. *Seeing money flying out the window*

We got the boy a tumbler since the girl already has one. We haven't got them stationaries yet. Will probably get those cheap sets that comes in bulk since they keep on losing them! Sigh! No matter how much I scold, nag, persuade, inform, teach, tell my girl. She still comes home with missing pencils and erasers.

Then I went to have a look at the school bags. Now this is a area that I am blur upon. I keep reading that the books are very heavy so I see the kids having this pull along roller bags like the ones you take for long distance travelling in an airport. Should I get one of those? It'll surely be hard to navigate along stairways wouldn't it? I saw those pink pink Princess, Dora types and it cost RM130! *faints*

Do the schools allow children to carry those? Can the children carry anything they like or are there some rules and regulations they must follow when it comes to school bags? What if it becomes the envy of friends etc? So many issues to think about. In the end, I left the bags because I didn't know what to buy. Can any experienced mums please share?

Throughout kindy, I let my girl carry the schoolbag provided by the kindy. Some of her friends carried fancy bags but I didn't get her one. I got her to do some of her own name tags etc to decorate her own bag and she was fine with that. Now the school does not provide bags so I have to get her one of her own but I don't know what to buy. Please help?

Have you done your back to school shopping yet? I decided to do mine early so that I don't have to rush as soon we will need to do Christmas Gift shopping and then Chinese New Year Shopping for new clothing. Is there any back to school items that I have left out?

The School Holidays so far

What we did for the school holidays so far.

Day 1 - Visit Dentist and Watch a Movie
Day 2 - Put up Bookcase and get the kids to pack their books
Day 3 - Get the kids to pack their bedside drawers *
Day 4 - Grandpa came over
Day 5 - Art & Craft Project

* The kids are allowed to put some toys and books in their own bedside drawers and its really convenient to ask them to "Keep everything away in your drawers" at bedtime to get rid of clutter in the bedroom. I have to check the drawers periodically though otherwise it will explode. The little one has stuffed so many toys and books into it that it almost broke!

So they have to pack their own drawers once in a while to decide what they would like to keep in there. I would bring their drawers in the playroom, empty it then ask them to sort them and put them in the respective toy boxes eg: cars, animals, blocks, party toys etc and then they get to choose new ones. This way the kids get to be responsible for their own things and they help mummy to pack as well. Its a great activity and something to occupy them.

These are very simple activities but they enjoy it and its much better than watching tv all the time.

Our home lesson plans will start a bit more seriously next week. Will probably start by going through the girl's test papers with her. Afterall, whats the point of doing tests if you don't do a review to explain the results.

Today is Art & Craft Friday in our timetable but I will write about that next week as this post is getting long. :)

Year End School Holiday Program

Its the school holidays again and as usual the kids look forward to their "Home School Holiday Program" or "Home Lessons". "When can we start our home lessons?" they ask eagerly.

To start off our "Home Lessons" we had to first set up our room. Hehe. We had gotten a new shelf for their books which had grown so much it was exploding our own shelves. I think its the "Billy" bookcase from Ikea. I put it together on the 2nd day of the school holidays and I was taken aback to find that the back of the bookcase was made of cardboard! Hmmm..... Cardboard! A thin piece of wood would have sufficed but cardboard! I hadn't noticed it when I saw the shelf at the store. It had looked so nice then. Hmmm...

Anyway, we put it up and I got the kids to sort their books ie which books belong to whom. There were 3 shelves. I designated a shelf for each of them and the last was a shared one. Then I got them to put their own books on their own shelves and to decorate it a little bit. They were more than eager to help. Finally we put their name label stickers on the shelves to stake ownership. Hahaha.

In the evening, we drew up their school holiday program timetable. There would be daily reading in Chinese for the Girl and English for the boy. The girl wanted to have two mornings dedicated to Arts and Craft but I managed to negotiate it to just one morning. Then we included English, Malay, Science, Moral and Maths Lesson plus another morning for "Computer Lessons" and we were done.

Each day goes something like this: Breakfast, Lesson, Lesson, Lunch, Reading, Nap, Dinner, Playtime. Then the girl decorated the timetable with glitters and hearts and we stuck it on the whiteboard with magnets.

OMG! I think I've been overly ambitious. Now, I won't have time for anything else. Help! Hahaha.