He enjoyed twirling the paper around though. I could not take much pics of Ko as most of the time I am helping her... :)

Imm preferred to do a sad face. :|

Tada! Happy with their work!

I have been wanting to collect enough bottlecaps for a long time. However, the various drinks I had were all of different kinds.. SO I made a commitment to drink only one type of ice coffee for a week (just see the sacrifices a mother has to make) and managed to collect my 21 white caps and 5 blue caps. Only then I managed my phonic game. The white caps are for consonants while the blue caps are for vowels. I pasted stickers on them and wrote all the alphabets. This was for Ko to sing the phonic song to the tune of abc song. Instead of singing the abc song, you sing "air, ber, ker, der" by using an animal. For me I used a stickee, something with a suction that could stick to certain surfaces. She loves songs so she really enjoyed it. 

I thought that was the end of the bottlecaps lifespan till we did another activity lately... a marble run activity! I got the inspiration from one of my favourite blogs: A happy mum.

 http://www.ahappymum.com/2015/10/diy-marble-run-game-indoor-fun.html

In her blog, she did not use bottle caps but made her own marble holder using toilet rolls. I improvised it at the last minute and tada!! Anyway, let me share what I did with them. Time is on my side as it is the school holidays. However, it can be difficult trying to let them do certain activities due to their age difference, thus art is always the perfect way: it is time consuming and you might create a future artist!:) 

This was what I used:

1) 3 rolls of washi tapes or coloured tapes

2) Collected around 10 (toilet rolls and kitchen rolls)

3) Marbles

4) Paints (optional)

5) Wrapping paper (optional)

You can also use cotton balls if the marbles are too noisy.

For Imm, I let him wrap the toilet rolls with paper as he enjoyed using glue. He also painted some toilet rolls.

For Ko, I let her use more of the washi tape. I would cut the lengths and she would paste them on. It does not matter if she does not paste properly as I would just help her to tape it over later on. It kept her really occupied for sometime, whew! Otherwise, her favourite complaints are always she is hungry.

After a few days of work (yes a few days as their attention span isn't too long), I set up this marble run when they were sleeping. I thought it was pretty easy from the blog post I saw but I realised I had to do adjustments, the gravity matters and I had to soften the impact of the marbles using slopes so the marbles would not suddenly fall out. Anyway, you could see the batman one; that was painted by Imm while for the princess one, I cut out some princess pictures for Ko to paste.

You must be wondering what the bottlecaps are for now. I used the other side and paste them into a box (they tend to shift when the marbles hit them). I wrote numbers on them so it could become a "points" game. For Imm, it was more for addition while for Ko, it was for recognising numbers. They really enjoyed it!

To wrap up our Christmas celebrations, we went to the Snowplay area near our place again! This time both of them played pretty long there and Ko enjoyed herself much better with Imm around. He will say things like let us make a castle or ask "can you make the door with me?" and she will be more engaged. Definitely much more fun to be around! :)

Hello Mr Snowman!!!!!!!!!! :)

Ko is a real fan of gingerbread man so I asked if she could help gingerbread man put buttons on for his friend...

I prepared a number die...

And some nice buttons.

There you go gingerbread man!!

Another counting game using montessori counters.

For Language, we did this preposition book which I did sometime ago... do just for revision...

For both of them, I took out some chalks and let them draw on the balcony floor since it could be washed away easily...

I guess this pretty much wrapped up what we did during the end of the year. To me, seeing my kids happy faces most of the time are the greatest blessings. Their innocence and joy truly rubbed off on me and I look forward to yet another year growing up with them and having fun.

I have been focusing more on Maths activities over the last month and since it is the Halloween season, there are certainly lots of Halloween activities online! Often, it would be a printable pack of various activities for different age groups so I would not print the whole set. I hate to waste paper resources. One such online platform I found recently was Gift of Curiosity. If you sign up as a member, you can download some packs for free. So far I have downloaded Halloween, Fire fighter and Watermelon printable packs.

Some activities for Ko:

1) Sequence activities. 

I would cut out one set with the whole sequence and another set individually. All these are prepared for you in the printable packs so you just have to print and cut them out.

2) Odd one out activities.

I found one set that is suitable for Ko; the difference of the odd one out is very obvious eg :  a totally different colour. Another set would be for Imm, which has subtle difference for the odd one out eg : one of the houses does not have a chimney.

3) Spot the difference activities. Only Imm can do it currently.

4) Matching shadows activity for Ko. Ko really enjoy these activities and can match the shadows well although they are not too obvious.

And for Ko, well,she just enjoyed making her favorite rabbits and drawing eyes for them. It is more for counting and finger training.

One of the Jack O Lantern faces that Imm did!!:)

Cheerios are seen not only on our tables during breakfast but now also on our play table.... purely because I will not be so paranoid to see ants crawling around, unlike in Singapore. And we can get to eat them as a treat after playing with them. (yes yes, I know what you are thinking, I will give them the ones in the box instead of those they have been meddling with.) In fact, hub's job was snacking with them right after... no doubt of the reason why he was sitting nearby while I was teaching them important life lessons - Counting.

I pasted some numbers on the table and then place playdoh at each number. Then I placed a stick on it. It was actually pretty messy because they took out the playdoh and played with it before my game and this home made playdoh was a little dry. However, it still served a good purpose in counting with Ko. My intention was just to let her count as much as possible, in different scenarios, in different times, with different objects. At two years old, she tend to count way beyond what was truly presented. For 1 and 2, it was ok, but beyond that, like if there were 3 dogs, she would go on counting 4,5,6. This game also encouraged finger training skills as the holes on the cheerios were small and she would try to put through the stick.

After that, I used the cheerios to count backwards from 100 with Imm. We have been doing some forward counting for a few days.

Before counting backwards, I have been doing counting to 100 using these monsters. I knew he loved monsters but I never know he liked it so much to want to count from 1-100 in 2 days straight. I then realised he did not know his tens... for example, after 29, he did not know how to say 30.

See him arranging these monsters. It was also easier that the 21, 31, 41 monsters looked the same and it was easier to spot. He also counted together with me.

Here is the monster link: http://www.themeasuredmom.com/free-preschool-counting-printable-monster-count-clip-cards/

Mission accomplished!!

Then, I worked on the tens issue with these cupcakes and singing a song that I know from Shichida. I just wished I had the abacus to show him. I wanted to count to only 100 but he wanted me to use all the cupcakes.

Here is the cupcakes link: http://doodlebugsteaching.blogspot.com/2011/09/counting-by-10s-cupcake-cards-free.html

Some other things I did also with Ko of counting 1-10 was using pebbles to drop in the cups.

This week, I wanted to input the concept of division to Imm. Thus I just made a few cards and laminated them. I chose a simple number : 12 and cut out 12 fish that looked like the one at the bottom. We will be fishing them later but I did the fishing the next day.

The cards looked like this.

We did the cards one by one starting with 2, 3, 4 then 12 penguins. Imm would give A penguin 1 fish, B penguin 1 fish then back to A again to make sure that the penguins had one each time. He could grasp the concept easily and could answer correctly when I ask so in the end how many fish each penguin had.

The next day, I chanced upon this art and decided that it is simple and easy to do for their age groups. The idea came from this facebook group called DIY Tutorials.

I prepared two paper plates and folded one for Ko, thinking that Imm can try to do the next one. I used foam paper to cut out two triangles for their mouths and cut out circles using hard paper and then used a marker to colour the eyes.

Ko really enjoyed painting and always wanted to do by herself. Being very OCD, I will go "AHHH!! You painted the white part red!" She will look at me, as though to say "what's the big deal mum? That's artistic." Imm on the other hand could paint by himself rather well. He will ask me to rescue him when he accidentally dabbed a bit of black paint onto the white part.

Pasting the eyes and the mouth!

And now, to further develop my division game... we did fishing! That was what the paper clip was attached to the fish was for. I like to laminate the fish so it doesn't matter even when it is put in water. Imm will fish a fish for his penguin and Ko will fish another for her penguin, further to input division.

Doing the counting next!