Day 1 of June Hols

1 June, Monday, is officially the first day of school holiday. I spent the morning with the children. In my previous post, I mentioned that I have targetted some activities to do with Phoebe during the holiday. They are:

1) Speak to Phoebe in Mandarin

2) Write the Alphabet with her

3) Help her to be more elaborated in her drawings

4) Teach her how to draw other animals

Since last Saturday, I have been trying to make a conscious effort to speak to her in Mandarin. Phoebe did reply to me twice that, "I don't want to speak Chinese." So I told her that it's okay if she doesn't want to speak Mandarin to me, but I will speak Mandarin to her. When I asked her a question in Madarin, she unconsciously replied to me in Mandarin, e.g. 'bu yao' or 'you'. She didn't resist. That's already the road to success =)

This morning, we spent about fifteen minutes doing some tracing of the alphabet A. I held her hand to trace two times. When it was time for her to do it, she kept saying, "I don't know." I told her that I don't want to hear her saying that. I want to hear her saying, 'I try.' Have to try to build her confidence up.

After the tracing of letter A, she get to write A freely in an exercise book, just to get her more practise for reinforcement. Initially, she wrote her A like the letter H, then I taught her to draw a dot and venture the 2 lines downwards from the same dot. It works! And there you have it, many 'A's from Phoebe.

After the writing, we proceeded to drawing because Reuben was grabbing the crayon doodling. So Phoebe said she wanted to draw a picture of herself. I taught her how to draw neck and body and hands with 5 fingers and I also gave her some suggestions on details, such as a tiara, some eyelashes, some buttons and I demonstrated on a separated piece of paper. Phoebe incorporated these details into her own drawing. And here you are, A picture of Phoebe, totally done by herself.

And then, she decided to draw a good person (in brown) and a bad person (in black). It's good that she could associate colours with characteristics and feelings :) I was pleased to see the 2 characters that Phoebe has drawn because she has remembered what I've taught her and that is: the neck, body, five fingers, hands and legs growing from the body (and not from the face, which she previously liked to draw). Oh! And C-shaped ears too. She has even added curly hair :)

For the rest of the week, we'll carry on with the writing exercises, the drawings and maybe we'll do some painting too! :)