Good to see the thread alive again
sunflower,
I am giving the kids the usual nordic natural fish oil daily... and when they are sick I give them culturelle Lacto-GG. I think that's about all I give regularly.... oh I also give them a sprinkle of wheat germ on their rice during dinner time daily.
re: classes
My kids have a surprisingly reducing number of classes these days. They used to have more when they were younger.
Samuel:
- individual violin class (sat am)
- abacus class (sat pm)
- group violin class (sat pm)
- English S & D (in school)
- swim class (sunday pm)
Joelle:
- music appreciation (last class ended last week)
- abacus class (sat pm)
- swim class (sun pm)
- English S & D (in school)
- may add art class soon
Joshua - no class
- may add little neuro tree and jg playclub soon
I am busy on saturdays only because Samuel's 2 violin class spanned across a long interval.. so cant do much in between.
They attended a term at berries orchard last year but I stopped them at Samuel's request. I wanted to put them back in but can never get in again... they are always full.
We considered them for I-can-read last term... they went for assessment and both got to the reading level. But I decided to shelf it ... save money. hehee Hope I wont regret.
But they both have daily English and Mandarin reading class with mummy. On the ride to school every day, they will read a page each from Peter & Jane series. Joelle is advanced in her reading so I used it to train her reading stamina....
My own language class in the car will do both reading for both languages, exposure to tenses, sometimes han yu pin ying (if they asked). We also will use phonograms to teach spelling.... eg. use of 'al', 'er', 'tion'...
No choice I gotta teach them myselves since their school had not given any spelling or tingxie, so I hope to aid their ability to spell any words impromptu instead... to prepare them for future spelling.
At night, if I am free, I will get them to write a sentence or two each... hopefully they will learn some writing skills too.
The problem with these is that I had the task of teaching them myself instead of delegating to class.... dunno whether good enough or not.
For Josh, I read with him almost daily. He has good attention span for books... so I will read or sing out of books with him. I also bring a little board with me everywhere I go... as and when I tell him a word, if I remember, I will write it and show him. Hopefully the frequency a word is shown to him will help him recognise and remember and understand the meaning. So far, he recognise quite a lot of words and know quite a lot of letter sounds already. The best thing is, he just started in a montessori playgroup these last few days and they teach phonic sounds of letters too! In june, he will start attending LW in the afternoon with his siblings.
Actually its so fun to teach our own children... just that I wish I had more time with each child... to teach them more wholesomely.
