Giving children experiences

How do children start standing on their feet?  How do they start doing a lot of things on their own, interacting with others?  How do we let them connect with the world, and what their teachers and friends are talking about in and outside of classrooms?

Apart from teaching them (and teaching them well!), I thought the other thing we can do for them is to equip them with lots of experiences; to let them see the many interesting things in the world.  Let them see the world through their own eyes and not ours; experiential-learning, if I may borrow the term used too much from MOE.

That is one of the reasons we enrolled them in play-school.  Let them learn to swim (hopefully) than sink once we let go of them.  At times, when we take on the role of their teacher, our children tend to learn less effectively as they would throw tantrums and such with us.

When their godfather asked if we were interested in letting the elder two watch a musical put up by their school (children under the age of three were supposedly not admitted), we jumped at the chance.  Why not?  Let's go and enjoy the performance as a family, I thought.  So on Thursday, 28 July 11, we got to Republic Polytechnic to watch Kuo Chuan Presbyterian's one-night only musical.

Rachel and Felix probably did not understand and had no premonition of what was going to happen then, but once the performance began, they were rather capticvated by it.  In between scenes, Felix was so engaged in the show that he kept asking aloud, "Where is Justin (the lead character)?"

All in all, it was a good first experience for the duo.  They were well behaved and did not throw tantrums though the performance ended a little too close to their bedtime for comfort.  We can safely plan for more experiences for them, knowing that they can 'rise to the occasion'.  A trip to the movies now beckons...

Felix is well! =)

Just as I thought Felix was the sole survivor of this episode of chicken pox in the family, I found myself wrong again.  I had dropped all three of them back at school two Mondays ago.  I was glad that they were back to play and learn, and I had some time on my own to catch up with work in the day.  Two hours later, I was asked to bring our boy back.  The reason?  Two small 'water bubbles', which had previously gone unnoticed, on Felix's neck.

So here we go again.  Felix had it mild in the first two days, but the pox invaded his thin body gradually.  It came at such great speed later that I asked if the pox were going to stop growing.  He seemed to have it bad too.  He cringed a lot and cried due to discomfort at night.  Yen and I had to take turns to go soothe him and many a time, he would end up sleeping in our bed after that.

Felix and I bonded quite well in the day.  We had a little 'system', where I would see to his bathing, getting breakfast and all for a couple of hours after I return from sending everyone off to work and school.  He would then choose to play with his toys or turn on the television to watch shows on Playhouse Disney while I marked or took a short nap.  Other days, I would insist on him doing work on the Nursery workbook that I had bought him, or his worksheets from his phonics class which he had missed.

We would have lunch after that, he played some more and read before taking his daily nap.  Most times, I would read to him from his encyclopedias.  While he napped, I continued with work before leaving to fetch his two sisters.  He played or watched shows after that.

As I had anticipated, he had a little problem leaving home for school after spending a month away.  Fortunately, I had bought him this book about 'Bugs' and I enticed him to go by asking him to bring it along to school to show it to his friends.  It had been a busy, but fulfilling month for me.