Founder's Day and Open house - 28th May 2015

Yesterday was Mee Toh school's Founder's day cum open house.  This year, Caden is  one of the prize winners in CCA excellence category (Scouts). So we were invited to attend the event in support of our child.

MP, Ms. Sun Xueling is the guest of honour for the event

 

It took him 3 days to get involved in rehearsals before this big day.. he must had some fun in school experiencing this ..

After the prize giving ceremony,  Caden partnered up with his classmate, Kesler, to man the Math Booth for the Open House event, as they explained some of the rules for a Math puzzle for those who visited.

 

It is the first time he represented the school to play the role of an ambassador and represented the Math department. I think he was selected as he's seen as someone ' dependent upon' to carry out the task with his friend.

 

Both boys had a good time and played their roles well when I stopped over to 'spy' on them.. Ethan obediently stood by the side and guessed his own set of answers..

 

Getting the participants to guess the sum of all sides of the dice (including the hidden sides)



a shot of their partnership at their booth

 



It's definitely a good experience for Caden for being involved in the Open House event this year.  One of the rare moments I get to photograph him in his scouts uniform in a school's setting =)



Taking a break - Good news for the boys

I have been spending some time with the boys on their school work since I started with part-time lecturing. 1 did well for exams but another didn't. I know it's very much dependent on the aptitude of each child so some things cannot be rushed.. If this is how I reason out with myself. A lot of my colleagues in school told me that they had been through the stage which I am going through now and 'warned' me the worst is yet to come! So their advice to me now, is to 'let it go', so no point getting affected by their results after all.

I gathered that if parents were to push kids too hard, learning becomes a pain to them.  Easier said than done, best approach to cultivate self-motivation is to get them interested in each subject. Obviously this is the ideal situation, but how many of us can succeed to get your own child interested in their own studies??? I don't have the answer - or perhaps it's draining to design customised programmes to each child under my care, on top of work, and house chores.

I don't know about other mums who have been spending some efforts on coaching, guiding their own kids on their school work, but I guess I am so done with whatever I was doing. I just need a break for now - how long, I don't know.. till the point when I can find my motivation to gear things up and explore a more appropriate approach, to introduce another learning approach for the boys.

So I suppose this is the best news for the boys... hopefully they get to enjoy their freedom while they can  - for now!

Caden's 11th birthday celebration

Caden turned 11 years old late last month and we brought him out for a Swenson's dinner at Waterway Point.

Given that it's a Thursday, we couldn't do much but to just have a nice dinner outside. It's also my first attempt to drive to the shopping mall and thankfully everything went so smoothly.

The boys as usual had some arguments amongst themselves and were not on good talking terms during dinner. Nonetheless, Caden is always happy when you put nice food right in front of him.. and on that day,  we saw so many other kids celebrating their birthdays in Swensons too!

His version of 'Topless 5' Ice cream

As Caden wanted to make a birthday wish out of a cake, he has asked for a mini one (cos we were all too full after dinner) to go through his favourite routine of the year:

 

And he managed to gobble up this mini cake in no time! what an appetite he has..

 

I wish my dear son good health and happiness always. And hopefully he gets more sensible and mature soon!

Kallang Ice World

On one of the long weekends last month, we met up with Brian's family for a session of Ice-skating!

We reached Kallang Ice World early, I think it was just 30minutes after 9am. There were already a few kids on the rink but the crowd was still manageable.

The 4 boys were very excited. They helped each other to wear their skating boots and went off to the rink. As it was the first ice-skating experience for both Caden and Ethan, we decided to just hold onto the bar along the circumference for a start.

Little did we realise that the children's metal bar is actually made available for kids below 1.2m and there are only 20 pieces on loan (for free!). First come first serve. By the time we realise we needed 2 for our boys, the metal bars were all snapped up by the later crowd...

Subsequently we found a few metal bars 'abandoned' in the skating rink, so finally the boys got some help.. Ethan enjoyed it a lot more with the help of the metal bar.

Caden was too tall for the bar but nonetheless, it's easier with the support

Most of the times, PaPa helped by giving him the support.. Skating is not for me so I ended up watching them instead.. hiak hiak..



 

After getting the hang of the sport, Ethan decided to let go of the bar and skate on his own without help.. Children really can pick up things fast!

Just 20 minutes before the 2 hour block, he's skating like a pro...



All the boys had a good time, they even spoke about when they can make a second trip here to skate again.. fees are not cheap.. It cost us $17.50 per pax for 2 hours (adults) and $15 per child. So for a family of 4 like us, total bill came up to $74 (including 4 pairs of gloves).

So to cut costs, we need to bring our own socks and gloves next round!

Hanging out with one of their best friends - Cherson

Cherson used to be Caden's best friend in P3 until his parents transferred him out to Temasek Primary school due to the long distance and time spent in shuttling Cherson to and fro eversince they moved to Bedok.

Cherson misses his friends so much that his mum has to organise gathering once in a while to bring Kesler and Caden over to catch up and have fun..

Gathering 1 (at Cherson's house): Last year

Gathering 2: Cherson's birthday celebration in May last year (2015) when he invited the whole of P3-8 ex-class to this event!

Some captain's ball game was played

Although Ethan wasn't part of the class, he mingled in quite seamlessly

The 3 best friends - Kesler, Cherson and Caden

Caden with a very 'round' face :)

 

I suppose Cherson will still continue to make an effort to get his mum to organise an annual catch up with his ex-classmates so this friendship will definitely continue for at least the next few years!

Patience, Endurance and Air

I am getting upset with a fair share of behavioural issues from my boys lately.  Caden has started to want to get things done in his own way. In the past,  I don't have too much of a problem getting him to work on my assignments or getting him to get things done before he rest for the day. Ever since he started his P5 journey,  or perhaps since end last year,  he becomes more complacent,  thinking that he's good enough with his studies and doesn't need to do more to reinforce his understanding.  Especially during this CA1 week, it was so hard to get him to stay focused to do his own revision,  he was easily distracted by stuff he wants to do ( like playing buddy fight, watching TV, or doing his own sketching). I always emphasize to him that he should complete the tasks with higher priority first, before spending time on his own interests.  He will always respond by saying that he already know the concepts so there's no need to revise.. and even when I went through his wrong answers with him, he will defend his own answers with a strong stand and refuse to listen from my perspective (or the model answer's view). I told him that if he's insistent with his own level of understanding,  I hope he can defend his own answers to his teachers should they mark his responses incorrect.

Ethan, on the other hand, started to throw tantrums almost once every two days. He goes on hunger strike during lunch if I don't lend him my phone to watch his you-tube videos. He stops writing his journal when I didn't allow him to use his reward to buy ping pong ball. He refused to eat his breakfast to show his displeasure.  He refused to do my assignments when he doesn't get his sweets. .. so the list goes on.

My ah lou's stand is just let them be- let E starve, let C do badly for his exams and let them take responsibility for their own actions.  I guess I probably cannot expect both of them to be as self-motivated as me when I was young.  These days, I have to take a step back,  learn to breathe more, and to have more patience, endurance and hopefully,  I can get through this nonsensical phase somehow...

Daily Journal

Ethan came back from school one day and updated me as follows:
 

E: ' Mummy, we got back our composition scores today. Highest score in class is 13/20. Rest are all below 10 marks. Lowest score is 3/20!.. Heehee...'

Me: ( frozen) ' So what's your score?'

E: "You guess?" 

Me: "Please don't tell me that you are that 3!"

E: "I'm 6! Hahaha.."

Me: "oh gosh.. why so bad???"

E: "my teacher said I wrote too short, no expressions, no relations made to another character,  and many more.. "

I know that E doesn't make much effort in terms of writing. It's surprising to know that he actually reads a lot of books but somehow, the strength of language has not been translated into his school work as yet.

I have started something last week, in getting both the boys to write a Daily Journal (aka diary) and write about whatever happens to them during the day. Each of them will earn themselves a dollar each, after 5 journals have been recorded. This seems to work out for them, as they seemed to have something in mind that they wanted to buy badly.

It's quite a good start, both of them have been writing diligently for the past few days, and Caden went a step further to have an additional component 'News report', which covers some news updates that he has watched on the News each night. Although it's just 2-pages of write-up each day, I guess this will help to cultivate them to write better and be more attentive to the writing styles as they read more.