POPULAR Book Fair 2015

My sister and I are book fair stalkers.

Books are expensive here, especially with the crazy exchange rate right now.

A small board book for the kids can cost up to rm40!

So, you can imagine how excited we are whenever book fairs come along.

We usually wait for a few major ones:

1. POPULAR RM5 English Books Fair

2. The Big Bad Wolf 

3. MPH Warehouse sales

After a few years, the books starts to look the same :p

We used to grab whatever board books available when the kids were younger.

There is no telling which would become the favourite.

So cheap ma, buy all laaaa!

This year, I tried something new.

I gave Tiger his own trolley to fill up with books that he would like to read.

That way, he was involved in the selection process.

Or whine. Or bounce eveywhere.

He did but it was at a more tolerable level than usual.

We ended up with lots of Animals and Dinosaurs books.

=.="

After I filtered his basket, we ended up with these.

 PS: I bought a 100 facts (Monkeys) from Bookxcess for RM 9.90

All the books here are rm5 each.

 

 

I picked some Disney illustrated version of classics. 

The illustrations reminded me of Archie :)

Should have gotten all for myself..haha.

One Tiger book, for Tiger and cats for Dragon.

 

 The Hello Kitty Book she hugs to sleep. Score!

She was such an angel at the fair.

Just chilling in the stroller with some random books Tiger chose.

 She requested for some coloring sheets and this is her work. Seriously.

These are my selections.

Some to complement our toobs and some for General Knowledge. 

 

These workbooks, we selected together with MIL.

Tiger requested for Chinese and Malay books.

The top row is 3 for RM10 (thicker).

The bottom row is 3 for RM5. 

Tiger's already started a-page-a-day on one of the chinese books;

 so that's missing from this pic.

School holiday homework!

Because he goes to a play school, he is so excited to be doing 'real' writing & homework.

"Did you do your homework?"

Nods his head excitedly, "I did two pages!!!"

It's highly unlikely he would be this enthusiastic after a few days of primary school 

in a couple of years from now. Such innocence. Tsk tsk.

 

 

 Some stationery.

A file divider rm 18 (NP: rm25). It makes the neat freak in me happy!

Sheet protectors. 2 packs for rm 15

Sofia Beginner UNO.

Foldable congkak.

Just realized it was a massive savings of 5% 

=.="

I am one of those stupid shoppers who thinks everything is cheap at fairs.

 

Still, I am pretty happy with our haul. A little bit of everything is our motto now.

As I was writing this post, I got a SMS from POPULAR, reminding me 

to spend more money at the fair. 

It's okay la, we've spent rm 268 already.

MIL bought three cooking books.

(Also not pictured are: one bottle of star sprinkles and a Minion pencil case)

***

So, in a nutshell, to survive the fair with kids:

Have a general idea of the types of books you want to buy.

Go early, during the beginning because some books & flashcards 

were long gone by the weekend.

Be fast and keep it short. (Otherwise the whining will start)

Give them a basket and let them think they are in control.

Filter books at the end. Do not try to argue in the middle of your trip.

Don't buy anything less than 30% discount. (stupid congkak mistake)

Everyone goes to the washroom before entry. (MUST!)

Bring an extra pair of hands if you can. Book fairs are like war zones. 

Still it was much calmer than baby fairs. I stay far, far away from those.

 

Good luck!

We Are Going to Legoland

Since the Ringgit is falling like bird crap, literally; our plans for HK Disneyland is colder 

than Anna Wintour. 

And Hubs being the indulgent father that he is, is still adamant to bring the kids to Legoland instead.
Given the current economic situation, the prices are bonkers but
Tiger was already over the moon about the trip at this point.
He has even decided on the Pirate Room for his stay. 

Pirate. Adventure. Kingdom.

According to Tiger.

 

After a brief discussion, Hubs and I decided to stay at KSL to save some moolah. 

Since the kids are still besotted with dinosaurs, they didn't make a fuss :)

Tiger, who is five isn't a big fan of Lego yet. We have two sets of Lego Duplo and one box of assorted Lego but no one likes them. *shrugs*. Too many other options? Not into building yet? 

In order to get them excited about the trip...we did some random activities pertaining to Legoland
on top of our daily lessons.

The pirate toy sets from ELC and LEGO are crazy expensive, so we make do with this.

RM 27 from Bookxcess.

We are getting thrifty :)

Lucky us, he got a mini Ninja Turtle set from a friend's birthday party. 

He worked on it immediately the next day.

We used some printables from Carisa's Lego Kindergarten Printable Pack 

He didn't complete the whole pack and I don't expect him to,

Just the ones he enjoys, like this cut and paste.

Celebrating their trip in advance like a couple of drunk sailors.

 

And this is the plan I asked for.

A map of legoland and a scary Freddy lookalike pirate.

Will post more pictures after we return :)

Dinosaur Phase - Five Year Old

Tiger is absolutely crazy about these ancient creatures.
We have officially departed from Outer Space and entered the Jurassic world.
Pity the Space Toobs and Planet Toobs I just bought. *cries*
I wouldn't recommend the Planet Toobs. It's just too small. You might as well paint your own.

We already have most of the materials from our first Dinosaur Week.
Dinosaur Bin was our first sensory bin. Has it really been that long ago?

Now that Tiger is older, he is asking questions and fascinated by the facts and stats.

The idea that some of these creatures were as big as building and trees. Wow...

They lived on Earth millions of years ago? How much is a million?

How do you read this name?

 Some of them have tongue twisting names, like Pachycephalosaurus,

A month ago, he wasn't able to name any dinosaur besides T-rex.

Now?  

Iguanodon is my favorite :)

A simple setup to start some reading.

We started with these fictional ones.

By the end of first week, he was more interested in reading non-fiction.

He really enjoyed asking questions about dinos and we looked up the answers in books such as this DK Dinosaur Encyclopedia or the internet.

To supplement his learning, I printed some worksheets and 

we did some simple cutting and pasting such as this one.

This 'fill-in-the-missing-number' worksheet is from Twinkl.

We used the Montessori 100 Board for self-checking.

 

Sometimes, he ignores my plans and ideas. 

He drew lots of dinosaurs over the weeks and I suggested some stamping of names.

Nope, as usual, he stamped his ABCs :)

That's okay too. My best intentions are secondary to his ideas.

 

For some hands on activities, we tried our hands at excavating dino fossils.

Got these from Toyrus warehouse sale at about rm 3.50 each.

This was a hydrosaur. It took several days as I refused to help.

Dino week meant big words: paleontologist, excavation, fossilized, mamenchisaurus.

But it also meant patience in this case.

 

 His favorite activity has to be: Bringing them to the playground.

I hid his dinos all over the play structure and the two kids went on a dino hunt!

Caught in action!

We used our Lasy blocks to create this Brachiosaurus.

I helped, of course but he did most of the work.

After years of saying "Try again." and "You can do it, just try.", it's finally imprinted in his head.

Children need encouragement and parents who believe in them.

I try to praise intelligently or sometimes, I just do a happy dance :)

 

He was so proud of his hard work.

 

 

So much so, he couldn't go to bed.

We watched some dinosaur documentaries on Youtube and it inspired this

recycled Koko Krunch Dino World.

His kindy uses lots of recyclable materials for crafts, so we are trying to emulate that at home.

For our field trip, we visited Dinoscovery in KL and Tiger 

was fascinated by the differences in the footprints of herbivores and the meat eaters.

At home, we did some foot printing on our kinetic sand. 

It wasn't very obvious but still, it was good, messy fun for them.

Then, there is the Chinese...

If only there is a potion I can drink to be more competent.

For now, Pleco is my best friend.

I now know that T-rex is called ba-wang-long in Chinese.

 We are still very much in the Dinosaur phase.

It may last another month, maybe two...

As long as he wants to learn, I will support him.

My girl?

She is so into role-playing.

Despite the fact that I have said many times that this is a DINOSAUR TAIL...

"Khang gooooo"

"Hop hop hop"

Haih....ok la. You win, my little kangaroo.

Have you heard of Dinovember?

Makes me want to buy those big dinos from ELC, arrrghhh.

In the mean time, I just froze some mini ones in the fridge last night,  so it ain't over yet, folks.

Stay tuned for more dino adventures!

Read & Play: The Billy Goats Gruff

Can't see properly?

Here, let me help you with that.

*blows dust off the blog*

Hehe. It's been a while.

This is our second Read & Play,  the first being the Three Little Pigs

Any books with animals are the best for my kids at this age.

We listened to the The Billy Goats Gruff CD a month ago.

It's part of this Audio book series if your are interested.

Then, Tiger got into the whole McD's Happy Meal toy and 

I commented that his Boovs looked like trolls.

He asked, "You mean like in the Billy Goat story?"

Yup, that was my inspiration and hence the invitation to play.

He wanted to build a bridge from his Lego instead of using the wooden bridge from his train set.

So, we designed a simple one together.

We have plenty of goat miniatures, so that was easy. (Yay!)

As we read from the books, he acted out the scenes.

There was a signage that read, 'Warning Goats Beware'.

I asked him if he would like to copy and he agreed.

This is how writing and spelling is done in our house.

Never mind that it's all wonky.

 

 He had a blast knocking Oh off the bridge.

Then he created his own storyline where Oh fought with all the other animals in the Kingdom.

My Little Dragon?

She was just a few steps away, with more important things to learn than Trolls and Goats.

Like physics :)  

For worksheets:

3 dinosaurs have a pack (free)

We are using some from Twinkl

After I wrote this, it got me thinking about 2 things:
1.) What is the meaning of Gruff in the title?
2.) Why is '3' used so repetitively in fairy tales?

I turned to Google and it seems,
The goats' surname or family name is Gruff!
Haha, never thought of it that way before.

And "three"in fairytales are discussed at this forum.

Basically, three represents a pattern and complete form of beginning, middle and end.

Toy Centered Learning: Knight versus Dragon

Knight = Tiger

Dragon = a toy, not the girl, ya? 

Most of the time it is the boy vs the girl.

But not today.

 This is our simple setup.

I only had two Usborne books about knights. 

I found the poor New Year Dragon in the Chinese New Year Deco Box.

Luckily I found him, otherwise we will have to use my daughter :p

My knight in rm17.90 armor :)

The helmet and shield are made from EVA foam.

They smelled when I took them out but quickly dissipated after I aired them overnight.

It came  in a set with this book from Bookxcess.

 (ISBN: 9781592238088)

You can read more about it here

We needed a sword, so I just cut one from a board and wrap the end with packing tape.

Took me about five minutes.

The kid was amazed...*flips hair*

We also had this IKEA play tent to complement our reading.

Not mine. On loan from my sister.
She buys new stuff and we get to play with them first..haha!

We talked about fighting and killing.
This child is preoccupied with the idea of dying.
If I urge him to do something risky, he will ask,
"Will die or not?"
"If I die, I cannot see you or Grandma. So I don't want to die."
Mind you, risk of dying includes jumping off tables @.@

He was irritated with the helmet after 5 minutes and
proceeded to plan an attack in his 'castle'.

His plan was to attack the enemies with magnetic alphabets,

arranged correctly and very neatly.

Perhaps he should just be a knight for Halloween.

Save me some money from buying a costume :)

Pretend play has a ton of benefits. 

I do it to balance some of the Tiger Mom activities we do, like addition and memory games.

Don't want a crazy, stressed-up kid at the end of the day :)

You can read about the benefits here

Read & Play: Three Little Pigs

This was initially a toy centered learning topic but I thought it would be fun to

built different types of houses to go along with the story of

"Three Little Pigs"

Here's the setup:

The toy is actually a picture from my kindergarten graduation concert :)

I've had the picture frame for as long as I can remember.

It's one of the few things that had survived my regular spring cleaning.

The books are a variety of pig-related stories found in our own little library.

But our main book was this one from Usborne

We really enjoyed the simple words and cute illustration.

Tiger especially enjoyed the verse, 

"Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin"

which he still uses to this day :)

Ours came in a set bought during MPH sales

 

I must admit that when I think of pig, the first thing that comes to mind is

bah kut teh and bacon. Terrible, I know.

But I didn't tell Tiger that part about pigs, yet.

Did you know that pigs are very intelligent creatures?

I found out about that in Singapore Zoo when I was 11 or 12 years old.

Go here to learn more about pig awesomeness

So, the houses were obviously the focus of my creative, engineering mind *ahem*

I wanted to use the straw from our broom at first...haha, not very hygienic is it?

Then I thought of straws!

I have lots and lots of them from IKEA.

We tried several methods and this was the easiest, a triangular prism 

 

This is our messing planning process, trying out different materials.

Tiger will imitate my thinking face as he thinks:

 one hand on hip, eyes upwards,  one finger on lips...

"Hmmm, what else can we use?"

My little Mini-Me

Setting up the props.

I didn't purchase mini a mini wolf/pigs.
We already had them in our farm and wild animal set. Lucky me :)

The straw house is the trickiest to setup and easiest to blow down,

He always played the wolf and I, the pigs.

  

 The wooden house made from unifix cubes base, some sticks and spatulas.

It had to be purple.

The pig in the house No. 2

 He huffed and he puffed very, very hard...haha!

Our lego 'brick house'

Genius ain't it? I thought of it and I hinted the idea to Tiger.

When he thinks it's his idea, he takes pride in his work :)

Win-win

We read all the books repeatedly, except Peppa Pig which Dragon girl had refused to share.

My bad for stating it was her present :p

To complement this activiy, we used printables from 3dinosaurs, here.

One of our most successful project to date.

And no, bacon was not discussed at any point.