There was also this dining with the sharks experience. It was weird as we seemed to be eating their friends right in front of them.

There was a water area but we spent the time at the playground. Suddenly, the kids come running into the cafe screaming, "the bird is here!!!!!" They were so eager to pose a photo with the mascots.

Shooting at the people in the water play area!

Our last place for the day was Ushaka Beach. The sand was a little coarse, different from the beaches we went to.

A picture with the lighthouse in the background!

Mummy rhino and baby rhino.

One of my favourite activities was milking the goat. Imm also had a great time and we could also drink the fresh milk after that. One of the workers also showed us how cheese was made.

5th Day: Visit to Zulu Village

It was indeed a nice experience learning about the zulu culture and they also performed a dance for us which hub joined in! :)

We definitely had lots of lovely memories at this place! I was glad all plans fell into place and we could make this trip happen as it was a last minute decision..... :)

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!

I have been postponing teaching Ko the letters till she was about 2 years old as I was still feeling the remnants of the exasperation with Imm when I was teaching him reading. But I realised I better get started. Also, she does not show much interest in letters in the beginning unlike for Imm. She enjoys singing and catches on easily in singing both Eng and Chinese songs but runs away when she sees letters. Maybe because I started to act like an anxious kiasu Sinaporean Shichida ex teacher filled with anxiety that it started to rub off on her, even though I always tell myself to chill. Anyway, my motto in teaching is always to have fun. Only when Imm had chicken pox and is stuck in Spore, I started to spend more time to teach her. Maybe that's how it is with the second kid. Always having remnants of the time, energy etc. 

I started doing these alphabet cubes sometime ago. They are used from the Happy Meal Macdonald Boxes. As I mentioned from another post eons ago, they have other uses (from another game). I love these. Each letter will correspond to each picture and we will try to throw it together. Sometimes, Ko will go "vvvvv" (sound) witch!" which makes me collapse on the floor with my hands in the air or she will give a gleeful "ffff" tiger! And we start to redo our alphabet dice again.

One thing I did lately was to think of a simple game like these. Found these magnetic paper in my stash. They are bought from daiso and I finally have some use for it. What is good for these paper is that they can be printed directly on it. But I didn't as I wanted my alphabets to be mixed up. 

I printed these alphabets from http://pdf.mrprintables.com/mrpac02-lc.pdf and cut them out before pasting them with derision onto each B5 piece. For each card, there are letters with sounds she already knew, thus it would not look absolutely foreign to her. Also, I made sure not to put "b" and "p" together for less confusion,

I cut out some shapes from magnetic paper as I was planning to play this game on the magnetic board. I then "hid" each letter behind the shape. I will ask her in Chinese, "who is hiding behind the red triangle?" And she will remove that particular shape. Then I will say the letter sound. I did it in an extreme high pitch voice of excitement to stir interest. What surprised me was that she enjoyed it so much that she wanted to play all of the cards. Which was good. :)

I printed out these worksheets from www.overthebigmoon.com and used our do-a- dot markers to play to emphasize the letter I wanted her to learn that day.

I found out recently that she enjoyed tracing and could follow dotted lines these days.

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!!:)