October's Theme

Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See.

Eric Carle is one of my favourite author for childrens' book. Therefore for the month of October, I read the Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle's classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? This is a great book because it is so repetitive and children loved it. We'd read it many times and it was amazing how quickly even some very young pre-toddlers respond to and "learn" this book. Eric Carle's art is simple yet vivid and the repetition in the words is so comforting and confidence-building. The simplicity of the book makes the children able to read themselves before they can actually read words.

This book consists of nine animals character. For the development of language and literacy, the toddlers' learnt to connect to the beginning sound by using sandpaper letters to the animals from the book. This acitivity enable the children to have further practise on the letters that they have learnt during our language session. We also have all the names of the animals posted on our word wall. Here the children are free to point and read the words whenever they want.

We played "I Spy" with them too. In this game, the toddlers as well as the pre-toddlers had to name or point to the things that we asked for. Here we played "I Spy" to introduce colors. Thus promoting development in mathematical area as well as language.

We also used bear counters for mathematical development. We did counting using the bears to match the number on the number card. Here the children would be able to connect symbols and volume. Besides counting, the children did grouping on colours too. The bear figurines were grouped together in their respective colour groups. Apart from grouping, we also did sequencing.

We have mounted the animals template which was coloured by the children. These cards were placed randomly on the table. The children then took turns to sequence the order of animals used in the book.

We made honey drinks for our cooking sessions. They poured amd stirred and eventually enjoyed their drinks. This activity encourages personal, social and emotional development as well as physical and mathematical development.

Trying to get the attention of a group of toddlers is every teacher's daily challenge. Therefore we always engaged them through the senses of sound and sight during our Learning Circle sessions. By incorporating these, we are able to capture the interest of the children. Last month, we sung the Brown Bear song. As we sang, we incorporate the movements as well as the sound of the animals.

The children loved this book. We had so much fun learning and exploring number, patterns, sequencing and many more. We can't wait to explore with the children for our upcoming November's theme.

Halloween Party

Yes, it's Halloween once again and this year's celebration took place in my house. Before I brag about our party, let me introduce to you the origins of Halloween. Halloween's origin dated back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain( Celtic New Year) where Celt believed that on the night before, the boundary between the worlds of both the living and dead became blurred and allowing spirits to pass through. Thus the living disguised themselves from the harmful spirit by wearing ghoulish costumes and mask.

Well for us, this celebration is mainly to have fun and to foster closer ties with the parents and children.

The preparations and plannings for this Halloween party begun two weeks ago. Most of the decorations are made by the teachers and children. Among of the decorations were candle holder, candy holder, tissue holder, tomb and many more. Teacher Chris and Teacher Michelle were at my house as early as 10am to put up the decorations. While the rest of my staffs came in at 4.30pm to help out with the food. It was unbelieveable to see my beautiful garden has turned into a spooky and eerie garden.Skeleton and spider web were seen hanging on my beautiful lamp post, tombs were all over my garden, wall decorations such as the haunted house, scary Jack-O-Lantern and others were stick on the wall. Tiny bats were all over the walls and pillars. Lights were switched off and lots of candles were placed all over to brighten up the garden. It was certainly a frightening sight and I could hardly believed my eyes that my house has indeed turned into a haunted house.

Evening came, both parents and child dressed up in the weirdest outfits imaginable as well as cute and sexy ones. Since we did not go house-to-house trick-or-treating, we had a few interesting activities for both parents and child to spook the night away. We had the dads to dressed up as mummy with mums' help and also building scarecrow by parents. I must say that they made an excellent job and very creative indeed. Way to go parents !!! Meanwhile the children went for a witch hat hunt and ghost lollipop hunt.

Well this party won't be complete without food, isn't it? We were so grateful to all parents who contribute foods making this party somehow a pot luck party. We has cupcakes, jelly, pizzas, tarts, fried noodles and many more. Myself, who is always keen on cooking, made tomb-sandwiches, spider nuggets, ghost sausages and wiggly worms orange cordial. What a feast !!

As for the Halloween costume competition, we would like to congratulate Jean Cheah for winning the pre-school category and Caleb Goh in Toddlers category. Jean was dressed as a geisha ghost and Caleb as a handsome pilot.

At the end of our party, the children were presented with trick-or-treat goodie bags to take home. I hope they will all remember the night, the fun and the excitement.

Thanks, Adrian, for capturing the night for us and finally to the wonderful people who turned up for this event ( even though late-better late than never, aye!). It was indeed a bewitching bash !!!

p/s: Have you cast your vote for our Halloween coloring competition? Please do so by 15th November. Thank you.