From Soon-to-be to Now Mrs. Keir Blog

As Sticky Bean enters Kindergarten 1 this year, I start to feel the pressure in her academic progress. Her school has been giving her homework every Friday as well. Much as I sympathise with young children in Singapore these days and how we emphasize on academic results in young children from such an early age, I need to ensure that she's prepared for Primary 1. I am still a firm believer in playful learning hence I always try to find fun ways to teach Sticky Bean through play. Now, learning or teaching sight words can be challenging as you may not be able to sound some of them out. Some of the sight words require the child to memorise it by heart. This ain't gona be easy...aarrgghhh... Alas, I found some ideas online, actually, there are tons of ideas available online, since you can also google them easily, I'm not going to share them here. I'll share what I did with Sticky Bean instead. Every day, I'd write some sight words on the board, those that I ju...

Sticky Bean isn't a fan of writing and colouring and runs out of patience really fast. She can colour a maximum of 2 pages and do her letters tracing for a page only before running out of patience and demanding that she stops. So I googled for fun letters writing activities and got this salt tray idea! It's simple and low cost. All you need is a tray, colourful pieces of paper and a box of salt. I'm using the 500 gm salt in this case. Sticky Bean had fun tracing letters in the salt try using a brush. They can use fingers to trace as well but I'd prefer her to use a brush since it's similar to holding a pencil and writing as compared to using just her fingers. This letter writing activity with a salt tray proved so much fun for Sticky Bean that she managed to practice writing with so much more letters. On the downside, it can get rather messy with salt all over the place so be warned!  Age attempted: 3.5 years Will I do it again?: maybe...

Earlier when browsing Qoo10, I came across these reward tokens at a really reasonable price. Think it was around $5 or so and that inspired me to come out with this reward chart which was so effective with Sticky Bean.  I've DIY'ed the reward chart using powerpoint and listed some items and activities Sticky Bean can redeem using the tokens she's earned. For every positive behaviour such as brushing her teeth twice a day, not throwing tantrums, not pooping in the diapers, obeying our instructions etc, we will reward her with tokens. We still need to fine tune the list of rewards though. For example, I do not want to limit trips to the playground with redemption only. To ensure the effectiveness of this reward scheme, do try to use exclusive rewards that are redeemable only via tokens. For example, I do not give her lollipops on a normal basis so the only way to get lollipops will be to redeem with her tokens. Sticky Bean gets to practice counting a nd learn...

And so I've completed my very first Quiet book activity with felt letters and am completely addicted to sewing with Felt! I've been looking at quiet books for a long time and kept procrastinating starting work on one. Then it dawned on me that it's time Sticky Bean learn how to spell her name. Once she learned how to spell her name then at least it's easier for her to learn how to write her name. But how can I make her learn how to spell her name in a fun way? I'm a strong advocate of learning through play especially for preschoolers and below. So I came across this idea of creating a hand sewn felt letters / alphabets board and decided to finally stop my procrastination and get working on the felt pieces I've kept stashed under my bed for the past year. It's also a perfect opportunity for me to use this as the cover of my quiet book that I'm going to create for Sticky Bean. I've found this hand sewn felt alphabet template from Purl Soho . Cl...

In this post, I'm going to share a series of DIY activities for toddlers and preschoolers done at home with Sticky Bean. Some of the activities were done some time back so I've decided to collate these outdated post in this blog post. Most of the activities were done with Sticky Bean when she's 20 - 30 months. Sticky Bean is actually coming to 36 months now, so that's how outdated these activities were. First I would like to showcase something I'm very proud of. Finally got time to packing and getting a storage solution to sort out the different type of activities we do at home. Quiet books are so trending right now, I bought tons of felt cloth from taobao and been wanting to start working on it but never get down to doing it. Instead I bought some of the ready-made activities and let Sticky Bean work on her fine motor skills with these DIY activities for preschoolers and toddlers. The velcro dots were easy for her and she managed to get the zippers r...

And so I wanted to introduce the concept of differentiating between sizes to Sticky Bean. This activity was first introduced to her when she was 25 months. Now at 30 months, she's able to complete this without mistakes and it proved too simple for her. Got these lovely farm animals printables for free and printed them out. I do not have a laminator at home, hence I used the cheapo but time consuming method of pasting scotch tape over the cut outs, both front and back to make them reusable for a few more times. Initially, Sticky Bean was confused and doesn't really understand what she need to do. She tend to put identical animals together. This went on for 2 or 3 sessions and I've to tell her and repeatedly show her this is big, and that is small. Big goes here, small goes there. By the 4th session, she managed to get it! *phewz finally** Perfect activity to get toddlers to do sorting and differentiate sizes. Do feel free to download these FREE printables ...

One of the back dating posts again. In fact this activity was done a long time ago in Oct 2015, when Sticky Bean was just 24mths. Back then she has not started school hence I try to incorporate some 'curriculum' with her at home. Of course by now, at 30 months, she's able to identify all of the basic shapes - circle, triangle, diamond, square, heart, start, crescent. Shape of the week: Triangle Objective: To introduce to her the various shapes and characteristics of triangle First I introduced a sensory bin. Got these mini triangle cardboard from a filler in our warehouse and brought it back for sensory play. I've also used this another sensory bin play here . So they were really useful. I believe in using upcycled materials, saves the earth and saves $$$. So the bin is filled with the triangle shaped cardboard fillers and whatever items I can find at home that were triangle in shape. After which she had fun sticking pieces of triangle paper on the sti...

And so I read about how much fun and sensory it is for young toddlers to be playing with play dough and how versatile it can be for toddlers activities as well. I'm such a sucker for versatile products when it comes to toddlers activities so I tried my my hands on making our very own edible play dough. Ingredients 2 cups of plain flour 1 cup of salt 1 tbs of oil 1 cup cold water Optional: food colouring, i use red and the dough turns out pink! pretty!! Instructions Mix plain flour and salt Add everything else and mix well, you probably need to do quite a bit of kneading Add water if it's too dry or add more flour if consistency is too wet This recipe's definitely not the best edible playdough recipe out there. I find the dough a little too crumbly and oily. It leaves bits of crumbs behind and a little bit of oil stain on our couch. Trying to be the smart alec, I added more water the next day when we bring out the play dough to play and when Sticky bean...