Disney Live! Three Classic Fairy Tales!

It's 28 Nov 2014, our 11 years 11 month dating anniversary.  But we celebrated it with our little princess at the super expensive Disney Princess Live show at the Marina Bay Sands. 200 bucks!!! :P

It was a pretty much anticipated event since it was held in the same week as Le Xuan's birthday. Furthermore, Papa just passed his first exam paper, so it was kind of a breather for Papa too :) 

A family shot before we left for the show

The show started at 6.30pm, and there were so many people at the show. I was taken aback when I saw how parents splurged on their kids, buying them toys outside the theatre and some kids were even dressed in princess costumes with princess hairdo too! We could see that Le Xuan was quite sad and envious when she saw most kids with toys on their hands. Although I felt kind of sad to see her disappointed look, I was also glad that she didn't throw tantrums at all, and she got over it after we went for a meal after the show.  

The show covered three disney princess fairy tales, namely Snow White, Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast. The characters, costumes, stage props, music and dance were impressive. We could see that everyone in the theatre enjoyed the show very much. Papa commented that the show would be even nicer if they could sing the songs live, haha.

After the show ended at 8pm, we were hungry and decided to go for a meal at the food court. And to our pleasant surprise, the christmas decorations at the atrium were so beautiful! And of course, it's photo taking time! :)

It was a lovely time spent as a family, and I'm glad Le Xuan enjoyed the show as much as Mama Papa did.  Hee, but Mama Papa are going for our couple time the next day with a Mookata dinner! LOL.

Darling's First KTV session!

This is a super overdue post as it actually happened on 21 Sep. It was a Sunday, and I suddenly had this idea of bringing darling to KTV as she had never been there before. So we decided to try out Teo Heng KTV at Sembawang shopping centre.  We had a lovely lunch at Astons before our KTV session, and not forgetting a nice family portrait taken by a helpful family sitting next to us.

Our Nice family Portrait :)

When we reached Teo Heng KTV, we managed to get a small room and were glad that children songs were available, but they were rather outdated. Papa went through the whole catalogue patiently. Lucky we found the Frozen theme song which she enjoyed singing. We also managed to find some songs that she heard before especially mandarin ones, and it was really amusing to see how she held the microphone happily and immersed herself in the songs, regardless of how the songs should be sang, hahahaha.  I wonder how she'll feel when she hears her own singing when she grows up.  Luckily Papa took a video down.

Our Sweet Darling Singing :)

Time passed so quickly and our one hour booking was soon over. Poor Papa and I only managed to sing a song each, while the rest were taken up by our darling, hahaha.  And of course, with her eyes glued to the screen most of the time, neither me or Papa could take a nice shot with her. Nevertheless, we were very happy to see that she enjoyed herself so much, and I'm sure she would love to go KTV again. :)

Show and Tell in Kindergarten 1

Since Term 2 of K1 at MMI, Le Xuan was required to do four show-and-tell every term. Term 3 has just ended, which means she has completed eight show-and-tell *Gasp*. I must say show-and-tell seems to be a homework for me as well, haha.

Although it can be quite time consuming to prepare and practise show-and-tell with Le Xuan, not forgetting her occasional tantrums along the way, I'm actually glad that Le Xuan has gained more confidence speaking in front of her class. Thought it is actually very important to master the Art of Public Speaking. Oh, and she is definitely one of the few rare ones who has done all eight show-and-tells :P .  As kids tend to compare, she would often ask me why she can't bring the piece of paper containing her speech (like her friends) to MMI for her show-and-tell.  Luckily she accepted my explanation that show-and-tell is not about reading off from a piece of paper, but more like looking at her teachers and friends to tell them a story.  

As Papa has been busy with work, he didn't get to see her practise her show-and-tell.  I took a video of it to show Papa, and realised that it's good to keep a record of her show-and-tell, and see how much she will have grown and improved over time.  

Theme: Describe an animal that is useful to humans.

Needless to say, there's another four more Show and Tell coming when Term 4 starts again! Le Xuan is totally enjoying her two weeks of school holiday now, haha.  Gambate!!!!!! :) 

Our Little Pony Rider

It was an impromptu decision we made last Sunday morning about exploring Punggol Ranch for Le Xuan to try out Pony Riding for the first time. 

So without much delay, I quickly packed darling's barang barang, making sure she had her sun hat, mozzie repellent and a fan. This little girl hardly goes for any outdoor activities and true enough, when we reached there, she asked if we could go somewhere indoor which had air con, LOL.  

We went to the main office (which was air conditioned :P), and papa bought the pony feed as well as the ticket for pony riding. Haha yup, we went to feed a pony some carrots and Le Xuan was scared to reach out her hands for the pony. After much encouragement, persuasion and demonstration, we managed to feed the pony together until the very last carrot stick which Le Xuan managed to feed the pony by herself. Whoosh! Haha although I'm pretty sure she won't want to feed ponies anymore. 

After pony feeding, it was time for her to try out pony riding. I was a bit apprehensive at first as I was concerned that she might be frightened. To our surprise, she was so happy riding on Bilage (name of the pony) that she requested to go for it again right after. And of course the answer was a no, $10 for a ride is also not cheap.  She can always go for it when we visit Punggol Ranch again next time. Here's a short clip of her inaugural pony riding experience. 

We were glad that the weather was fine that day, and definitely happy to see our little princess having lots of fun that morning at one of our rare "outdoor" outings. Until now we still find it unbelievable that our daughter has grown so much.  *sniff sniff*

 

Bye bye to milk bottles!

It's 4 months before Le Xuan turns 5 years old, and Le Xuan has said goodbye to all her milk bottles!
I must say it wasn't a plan to help darling kick the habit of drinking from milk bottles. It all arise from her falling sick and coughing badly for more than 2 months, which made us consider switching her milk from cow's milk to goat's milk, as cow's milk caused her to have more phlegm and thus worsened her cough. We had to start small by giving her only 30ml of milk from a cup every day, as she was quite adverse to the taste of goat's milk. And because of this, we had indirectly help to kick her habit of drinking from milk bottles henceforth. Now that she doesn't use the milk bottles, she seems so grown up! *sniff sniff* I'm proud to say that Le Xuan can drink 60ml of goat's milk twice a day now. Hope she'll increase the intake gradually! Jiayou darling! :)

Journey in teaching Le Xuan so far

I have been procrastinating about writing this post for a very long time. Think I better overcome the inertia now and get it going.

In terms of English, I have been focusing mainly on reading skills since Le Xuan was 3 years old. And that was when I started her with the Peter and Jane series and several Leap Frog (Tad and Lily) DVDs. I also bought the Brain Quest cards and sticker books that she could play with and trained her thinking skills as well. To complement her reading skills, we also played games like treasure hunt and charades. Oh and I pretended to be Barney who wrote letters to her too, haha.

Didn't really think it was necessary to start her on writing until she started her music lessons that required her to write the basic ABCs. That was when she was 3.5 years old. It wasn't an easy feat for both Le Xuan and myself when it comes to writing, haha. But I could vaguely remember that I started teaching her on alphabets that consist of only straight lines (e.g. A, E, F) before moving on to those that have curves (e.g. B, C, D).

After she has mastered her writing, the next step was spelling which requires her to be pretty good with her phonics. But I think reading seemed easier to Le Xuan than spelling. Reading requires her to blend the letters but spelling requires her to break the words into phonetic sounds and linking them to the correct alphabets. But I'm thankful that her school teachers at MMI are doing a great job at honing her phonetic skills and spelling and as for me, I managed to find a website (primaryresources.co.uk) that I can reference to guide Le Xuan with her spelling in a more systematic way. In fact, I'm also learning at the same time while I teach her as I was not taught phonics during my time. Some games that we played to cultivate her interest in spelling will be Hangman, the word jumble game, or spelling on mama's whiteboard (haha). I also compiled a list of common words (some are quite tricky) to practice with her sometimes: He, She, We, Me, My, You, His, Her, Was, Saw, Has, Yes, No, Put, Are, All, See, Some, Come, Have, They, Here, There, Said, Where, When, What, How, Who, Were, Why, Them, Their, Our, Your, Us.  To make it a bit more interesting, I came out with some short sentences that include these common words for her to write, which can also introduce her to punctuation like full stop, question and exclamation mark. As for activity books, she's only practicing the High Frequency Action Words book (by Christabel Hong) about twice a week, thought it will be so boring or even kill her interest in learning if it's about activity books every day.

Now how about Mathematics? It's all about learning through games. For a start, I thought Le Xuan should try to recognise numbers besides 1 to 10.  I must say the Bingo game really helped a lot.  As for counting up to 100, I find the snakes and ladders game very useful too. Being able to count up will help her with simple addition and slowly we started learning how to count down that helped with subtraction. To get her more interested in addition and subtraction, I came out with Le Xuan's favourite Cashier and Customer game and cut out lots of 'money' in $1, $2, $5, $10 denominations. Through this game, she also learnt how to count by twos, fives and tens.  When she's more comfortable with these denominations, I added in the $20, $50, $100, $1000 and also small chips that represented the cents. Besides the cashier and customer game, we also played the all time favourite Monopoly! It was really fun and Le Xuan was quite addicted to it for a period of time. And almost forgot another game that I made for her, which is the Peg the Numbers Game. She totally enjoyed pegging the number cards that reflected the answers to the questions on the pegs.

I was quite shocked when her school started asking questions like: 4 more than 62 is ____.  The number that come right before 52 is ____.  This seemed to be testing her on her English, so I had to explain further to help her understand. Recently, in order to help her with the addition and subtraction of two digit numbers, I came out with strips of ten beads that stand for tens, and single beads that stand for the ones.  Through this game, I hope it can help her to better visualize and understand the rationale behind the workings for addition and subtraction. As for multiplication and division, maybe next year when she's K2.

As for Chinese, I totally left the responsibility to Mum, but I could see that she's beaming with pride when Le Xuan's chinese teacher feedback that Le Xuan is strong in her chinese language, LOL.

How about Science? I have recently chanced upon this interesting comic called the Young Scientist which teaches science in an interesting way through comic. Le Xuan was very excited when she knew that I have taken up the monthly subscription for the Level 1 Young Scientist.  Hope that this will instill her interest in the area of science.  Hasn't really seen any good activity books for science yet, thought it's more fun to learn through the comic instead. Besides the comic, I make it a point to do experiments with her every Wednesday, introducing her what's hypothesis and conclusion. Haha, and also that experiments can fail sometimes :P

And of course not forgetting her piano! Papa made the effort to practise with her everyday, either theory or practical. With both Ms Lena Tan and Papa's guidance, I can see that Le Xuan is getting more and more musically inclined.  Really hope that she can persevere in learning piano which i'm sure will benefit her for a lifetime.

Peter and Jane 12b completed!

Wow, I can't believe that darling has completed all 24 books from the Peter and Jane series on 19 March 2014! It took us about 1 year 2 months to complete it.  I'm really grateful that these books have enabled Le Xuan to be quite a confident reader now.  I could still remember that I started her on this series when she first started her nursery at PCF, that is, when she was 3 yrs 2 months old. I decided to use these books after reading an impressive blog written by a mummy (tamarind phonics blogspot) on how she teaches her children to read.  It was also through this blog that I decided to buy the leapfrog dvds for Le Xuan to learn phonics in an entertaining yet effective way. Unfortunately this blog has been taken down.  Although Le Xuan has finished reading all 24 Peter & Jane books, I'll encourage her to read them again when she can, so as to enhance her confidence and reinforce her reading skills.

Hong Kong 2013

 This year's November was special for us. Besides celebrating Le Xuan's birthday, we also planned for our trip to Hong Kong and Disneyland! The planning took us quite awhile, but it was really satisfying to see everything fall into place as we made all the plans and bookings for our trip. We were getting excited on the day that we were flying to Hong Kong as we started taking photos at the airport. The 4-hour flight seemed quite long as we were flying Jetstar and there weren't much entertainment onboard.

 By the time we reached Hong Kong in the afternoon, we were all quite tired from the flight. Time for us to make our way to the hotel, Butterfly on the Prat. This was actually the first time that we had to find our own way to the hotel without our navigation buddy...Zzm. Nevertheless, thanks to dear's directions in the itinerary, we managed to find our way to the hotel without a hitch. Darling was also happy to get her own octopus card for the MTR rides.

After settling down in the hotel, we got ready to start our exploration of Hong Kong. Our first destination was the Avenue of Stars after we had a quick dinner. It was quite a long walk from our hotel, as we started to realise that a large part of our trip was going to be on foot. Avenue of Stars was quite crowded, but the evening breeze was cooling. We watched the Symphony of Lights before meeting up with jiu jiu and making our way back to the hotel. 

After a good night's rest, we started our journey for the second day by taking the MTR to Tung Chung for the Big Buddha tour. The experience on the MTR was surprisingly similar to our MRT. Mummy kept herself busy taking lotsa photos of darling during the journey.

When we finally reached Tung Chung, we were glad that our online booking saved us the wait for the cable car to Ngong Ping. The scenic cable car ride took almost half an hour and we were glad to finally reached Ngong Ping Village. As we made our way to the Big Buddha, darling climbed the long flight of stairs up with por por while dear and I slowly made our way up. Por Por was visibly tired from the climb when we reached the top. After spending some time taking photos and resting at the Big Buddha, we had the famous vegetarian lunch (on HK TV series) at the nearby temple. Darling also had a large helping of the equally famous soya beancurd outside the temple. It was also Por Por birthday that day. In the evening, we met up again with jiu jiu for dinner and celebrated Por Por's birthday at 许留山, the famed mango dessert joint, before turning in for the night.

Day 3 of the tour started with the Big Bus Tour of the city sights before we made our way to Victoria Peak. Taking the peak tram up to the peak was quite an experience, as the tram was inclined at a very steep angle. The tram ride itself didn't take too long. The peak was really chilly and we quickly put on our jackets. Darling was also excited to put on her bunny hat. We took some time to soak in the cool view from the peak before heading for lunch.

After lunch, we headed for the Madam Tussauds wax museum. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much from the museum, thinking that it will be just a museum full of wax figures. Well, it was actually that. But the whole experience was really fun, as we took turns to take pictures with the different stars and cartoon characters. Darling, who was slightly afraid at the start also warmed up to taking pictures with the characters in different poses later on. We were quite surprised to see comic characters like Doraemon and Astroboy, and wasted no time to grab a few funny snaps. The third day of our trip ended with all of us exhausted as we made our way back to the hotel.

Day 4 of our trip was no doubt the highlight for darling. It's finally time to go Disneyland! Darling woke up already very excited knowing that we would be going Disneyland. When we got onto the train, we were delighted to find that even the handrails and glass windows were shaped like Mickey Mouse. Darling was so thrilled as we were walking pass the front walkway to the tickets collecting counter. The whole atmosphere was just magical.

A large part of our Disneyland adventure was spent taking photos with the various Disney characters. We started with the furry bear near the entrance of the park. It was so funny when darling said that she couldn't take it and needed to hug the bear again after we had our photo taken. Of course, we couldn't miss out on the photos with her favourite Disney princesses and Minnie Mouse. We didn't really get to try out many rides due to the time spent queueing for some of the photos with the various characters. But really happy that dear did get to try out 2 thrilling rides with gong gong. We ended the day with darling totally knocked out but super duper happy from the trip. She couldn't wait to go back to take photos with the rest of the Disney characters that she missed out. We had to take turns to carry darling as we made our way back on the MTR.

The last day of our trip was relatively simple, we visited the Wong Tai Sin temple before heading to Harbour City. We had wanted to do some shopping at Harbour City, but as expected, we came back empty handed. At least we managed to snap a few photos with some of the Disney exhibits that were on display. And that concludes our super fun and memorable trip to Hong Kong! With darling constantly asking us when she could go back again, I guessed she must have enjoyed it very much too.