Parenting on Purpose

We are starting with our very first homeschool co-op this week at the Jurong Bird Park. Unfortunately, I was down with the flu and couldn't attend the first session. The mothers are going to take turns leading the lessons - I thought I would finally get the blog on this unit out which we did last November so that I could rehash what we did for the unit! This has been one of my favourite MFW units so far :) The perfect start to our "Nest" study -  a nest which Ye Ye and Nai Nai found outside their balcony! (No nestlings were hurt in the removal of the nest - they had all hatched and flown away.) We learned about the parts of an egg. Eggs for breakfast!  The little one gets a feel. We get to crush the shells to make egg shell paint. Saved for an art project for another day. One of the books we read for the unit. We learned that different species made different sounds. Our art project for today - a bird's nest in a tree. Our 4 yo's i...

Learning about the water cycle. I hardly have the time to blog our homeschooling journey. This week, we are at Unit 10 of our My Father's World K curriculum, W is for Water. Perhaps there's no better time than to be doing it this week, especially with the weather being unbearably hot recently.  It's also been a time of great mourning for our country with the passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, a founding father of our country Singapore. The concept has not been an easy one for our boys to grasp - they already understand his death to some extent, but understanding the immenseness of the loss for our country and the greatness of Mr Lee's rule and governance to make Singapore what it is today are not things that preschoolers can easily comprehend. We have started telling them stories of how he helped to make Singapore the place that they enjoy today, and one of the things the boys can relate to is the fact that through Mr Lee's leadership, we can enjoy cl...

I never know exactly how the boys (and I) are going to take hold of the units we do and it is always interesting to see whether we will decide to go deep or wide in our learning. We have evolved a kind of easy, fluid structure, which uses the letter sounds and their related topics from My Father's World K as a base, and then develops them from there. This time round, I decided to "row" a Five in a Row book to start the unit off. How to Make An Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman is a lovely book about a girl who goes to the shop to buy ingredients for an apple pie, only to find it closed, and she then proceeds to travel around the world on various modes of transport to obtain them from their sources. It's a very interesting book about food provenance, or where our food comes from. We started off with our first Geography lesson on the names of the continents. We used the Montessori method for this activity and sang the Continents song while labe...