My home is an exclusively English speaking home. Chris can spell English words he's only just heard for the first time. Yet, because of our educational culture where Higher Chinese is valued, emphasized and relied upon as a measure of academic success despite English being our official language of business, he has had no choice but to spend a ( Read more... )

So, I started on a new scheme of work this past Monday (although it's still the same job), and for the whole of this week, I have to go in to work every day. I made arrangements for the kids to be taken care of on my usual days off, which were yesterday and today.

I would be lying if I said that I hadn't found the past 3 days engaging, and ( Read more... )

This week's DT inspiration at Made With Love centers around boys and men. I haven't scrapped a LO about Chris in simply ages, and this was a great opportunity, especially I had some great pictures from our trip to Chicago this past summer.

Here's the LO, titled "Smile! It's a beautiful life":


( Read more... )

Today is my day off. There are a million things that I need to do before the family leaves for our vacation in 2 weeks, one of which is selecting pictures for a scrapbook that the mums in Natalie's ballet class want to do for our beloved teacher who is retiring soon. (it wasn't my idea to do the scrapbook, but by default the job fell to me, since ( Read more... )

My facebook status update today read as follows: "The local school system.  The greatest contribution to the degradation of the parent-child relationship in Singapore."

One of my old friends from secondary school days posted a comment to that, which spurred me to write this entry.  He asked, "What type of school system, in your opinion, would not ( Read more... )

On Monday I had a coconut to drink. Punctured the husk to insert the straw but realized I needed another hole to be able to effectively get at my drink.

Took the opportunity to teach son (who was hovering nearby) about how poking the 2nd hole dispels the vacuum, thereby allowing air to go in so that coconut juice can come out.

Brought it one step ( Read more... )

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When this school term started, I found out from Chris's class blog that they would be having floral arrangement classes as part of his art curriculum this term.  I was so impressed.  I think it's wonderful.  Aesthetically, there's so much that the principles of floral arrangement can teach these young kids when it comes to design, proportion, and ( Read more... )

... Because my Christopher came home today happily brandishing his Maths exam paper with a score of 100 marks out of 100.

Need I say more?

This is a really great feeling. I'm so proud of him...

Praise the Lord!!

Chris came back today with some of his year end exam results. One of which was that he had had one mark deducted from his English paper 2 because he had spelled the word 'favo(u)rite' as 'favorite'.

I was outraged for him when I heard this. I felt that his mark had been unfairly deducted. We live in an ever increasingly globalised world. Words such ( Read more... )