Mar 24th, 2009 Learning Can Be Fun
I struggle as a parent everyday, from the moment I open my eyes till when I snuggle up with lil Aaron to go to sleep every night. No one ever tells you how difficult it is being a mummy or a daddy and if only all kids came with manuals, wouldn’t our lives be a whole lot easier?
Ethan’s is now in his 1st year of real kindergarten and I have taken it upon myself to help him by ‘tutoring’ him. I help him with his homework every afternoon and I help him with his BM, English and Mandarin reading. Recently I’ve also started to teach him Maths and I have to admit that my patience is wearing thin. As a child my parents never demonstrated much patience with my brother and me so I never really acquired the skill (patience). So I find myself very hot tempered when I am teaching him and most of the time end up scolding him and sometimes even hitting him. (YES, I am ashamed) I admit he has learnt a LOT in 6 short months and even his teacher is surprised that he is one of the top english readers in his class now. He went from reading Peter & Jane Series 2A to 5A. (as a gauge, his friend Daniel is in Year 6 kindy and he is reading 4B) There are only 2 other kids in his class reading 5A now, so I am proud but my impatience is getting the better of me.
Over the short March school holidays, I went through his work as usual with reading and writing, using the old boring repetitive technique because I found that kids learn very well through repetition. Repeat, repeat & repeat and they will eventually get it! I was begining to forget about having fun like a 5 year old should. I was getting quite fed up that he kept forgetting his mandarin characters, even though he kept writing pages of the same characters.
So on the very last day of the 1 week holiday, I decided …. heck..who cares if he can’t remember how to write it, let him have some fun painting them. Ethan loves to paint, so I got him to paint the mandarin characters on A4 paper and this is what he said. “mummy, this is so much fun”
Here is a video of him painting the last character – shou , unfortunately I was having so much fun too that I forgot to take out the camera till the last word!
oooppps!! I just noticed that I entered the wrong year for the movie title, it is March 2009 not 2008. I am too lazt to re-edit the video and take another hour to upload it to youtube, so it will stay as 2008, please forgive me! 