There and Back Again

Minecraft on Xbox 360. My son is on the left and I am on the right. I am looking at his pet Iron Golem (he told me his name, but I cannot remember it now) As mentioned , my son watches many Minecraft videos on YouTube. During this December holidays, we have given him more time to play games on the iPad and Xbox. He is going to start Primary One in one week's time so we have been closing one eye to his game playing time (though I do drag him to the bookshop, to swimming and test his spelling once in a while). Nowadays, my son wants me to join him in his Minecraft games- both on the iPad and the Xbox. I have to admit that he is better at this game than him. He creates really amazing worlds in his games. I am really humbled when I see his creations.  He has named himself '8469 tryert'. His first online screen name / user name. I am looking at a trap he build. Unsuspecting villagers will walk and fall into the lava pit. He's a devious boy. He h

My son has always been an avid Youtube viewer. I know some people frown on kids using any handheld devices. I addressed this in a previous blog . But of course, you cannot allow uncontrolled access on media like YouTube - there are simply too many adults who swear freely on their videos. When users criticise them on their use of profanities, they point out that Youtube is only available for 13+ users - as if it is okay for a 13 year old to use the 'f' word. As a parent, we need to try to fight back against these people and only allow safe videos for our children. Let's see what sort of things parents can do to help make YouTube safe for our children. Create a family account Create a Google family account so that you can control the account and us it to login YouTube. Once you have done that, you can create playlists, monitor the videos they watch and control who communicates with them. Only allow them to create their own accounts when they are older, preferably when t

We were in Taiwan for a holiday during the third week of December. It was something we planned for quite some time. We thought of Japan and South Korea but eventually decided on Taiwan because my son is afraid of the volcanoes in Japan. Needless to say, we did not say anything about the fact that there are volcanoes in Taiwan too. He can be a very frustrating person to travel with. Once he has settled down in a hotel room, it is really difficult to extract him from the hotel bed and go sight seeing again. This usually happens at night and in the morning when we want leave the hotel room to have a meal. We usually try to persuade and reason with him, though it escalates to a stern tone and threats on some days.  But despite all the complaining, he does perk up when we reach each location. When we were in Sun Moon Lake. We wanted to visit the Formosa Aborigine Cultural Village (九镞文化村), but he kept complaining that there was nothing for him to do and that it was going to be very b

This month, my son finally completed his kindergarten education. Not that it is a big deal - after all, who really wants to know what kindergarten you studied when you were a little tot? But for a kid, it is a big deal. It is basically all they know! Lucas in his graduation gown Anyway, you can guess that kindergarten is almost over when there is a graduation ceremony. In kindergarten, when you complete it, you get to wear a graduation gown  and a mortarboard (actually, it is properly known as academic dress). When you finish primary and secondary school, you do not get anything! Even though you have achieved more! I hope I will get to see him in a graduation gown again. Maybe a few times. Maybe with a lot of colours and a Tudor bonnet instead of a mortarboard. My wishful thinking. The final day of his school was last Friday. We are going on a holiday to Taiwan and after that, he is not going back to kindergarten. We hope to let him have a good two weeks of 'rest'. He

Big Hero 6 Last week, we went to see Big Hero 6. We heard so much about it - watched the trailers and read the reviews. Lucas was also very keen to watch the movie. After I finished work, I brought him (he came to my office) to meet my wife at NEX to watch the movie. It was very funny at first. My son laughed out very loudly at many points of the movie. He also enjoyed the fighting scenes. However, at the last part, when Baymax (the marshmallow robot) 'sacrificed' itself so as to save Hiro, my son got very upset. He remained very upset throughout the whole journey back home, despite our attempts to point out that Baymax's memory chip survived and Hiro was able to build another Baymax. He did not seemed convinced that robots and people are different. Actually since young, he has been quite sensitive to loss, hurt and deaths in movies. When he was younger, whenever the television showed people in combat or in conflict, he will be very upset and demand that the televi

Orientation Map of Catholic High The previous Saturday, my son went to his Primary One orientation. I hope he really loves his future school. I really love his school - for one, it is also my school. I spent 11 years in Catholic High School. One year in Pre-Primary (during those times, MOE allowed schools to run their own kindergarten programme), six years in Primary and four years in Secondary. I hope he gets to spend 12 years there - six years in Primary and six years in the Integrated Programme. Of course, I have little control over whether he qualifies for the final six years, but I am going to try my best to prepare him so that he can qualify. Mind you, it is totally fine if he does not qualify. I am sure my father was happy enough that I made it Catholic High instead of Raffles (his alma mater). We were soon separated after we arrived in the school hall. I was glad he did not show any anxiety after being made to sit with his future classmates. I also managed to catch up w

Next year, my son needs to go to a student care. I know many people disapprove of it, but I think it is the best option for us. There are many reasons for this choice - both of us are working and we do work late (I finish earliest at 8.30pm and my wife needs to take conference calls at night when projects are due). The only person that can take care of my son is my parents. But they will be unable to help my son much - the syllabus has changed so much from 60 years ago after all. I visited three student care centres around the Marine Parade and East Coast area, checking them out. One of them turned out to be a total disappointment. Despite advertising that they give help based on multiple intelligence, they just do baby-sitting services. They do not even pretend to follow their own marketing! It left two choices. Both seemed to have good administrators and teachers, but one of them really bugged me. They needed us to buy past years examination papers, and the story was that after

Optimus Prime I took my son out of childcare this Monday to bring him out for a day of fun. I know I will never do this when he is in Primary school, but since this is only Kindergarten, it is alright. My wife also took leave, and we had planned to go somewhere together. At first we wanted to go to LegoLand, but decided otherwise because we already had a LegoLand trip planned in December. It seemed to excessive to go there now. Anyway, I decided that we needed to go see the Transformers exhibition. We had sort of missed it when we were in Macau in June. When I said 'we', I mean my son and me. I had to go off in the middle of that trip because I was busy with my school's holiday programme and I did not stay behind to bring him to visit the exhibition. As you can guess, my wife's motivation to go to see Transformers is zero (actually, her motivation to see the things Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones is zero as well). Needless to say, she was very h

Recently, a friend's blog mentioned about her trying out some audio books when she and her children were travelling in a car. That struck a chord with me. I am very busy with life, yet I want to read books. So what I have done is to subscribe to blinklist (a service that summarises books) and Audiophile (a audiobook seller). Thus far, I have been enjoyed my short summaries and listening to books being read out loud while I am driving. This friend's post got me thinking that since it worked for her, I can try getting an audiobook for my son so that he can listen to stories in the car. It is good for him to practise his listening comprehension skills, as well as to listen to crisp spoken English. The book I chose to buy was 'The Book with No Pictures' by BJ Novak (writer and producer of The Office). It was an excellent book and since there are 'no pictures', it works perfectly fine as an audiobook. The book was real good and my son was very tickled by the

Recently, Lucas' spelling marks dropped. From my own analysis, the problem is that I did not ask him to write it down. Instead I just relied on him speaking the letters out loud. Actually, it is pretty silly of me. Whenever I test my students, I always insist that they write down all the answers. They always protest, but I always tell them that it is for their own good. If the test is written, then the retrieval must be in written form. Then I always give the analogy that if all they want to do is to speak the answer, then it would be like a runner just imagining the race instead of really going for practise runs. The irony of it, not following my own advice. At the same time, I am still not happy with the school's theme-based spelling. After some research, some sources say that theme-based spelling lists must also include the etymology of the word. I am still not convinced. I am not sure that a six-year old really understands what is etymology. By the way, for the non En

Some time ago, the whole family went to the trampoline park together with my brother-in-law and his family. This was our second visit to the park and their first to the park. It was great fun. Now, I always encourage my son to take up physical activities. This is because I always believe that good physical condition means peak mental performance . I know this sounds hypocritical when you see me, but I really try to exercise. It is just that I have a lot of difficulties in losing weight. (I still can swim pretty well now; I represented Catholic High and Temasek Junior College in swimming). I went to the Catholic High Alumni dinner two weeks ago and I was impressed by their Modern Dance and Wu Shu. I certainly hope that he can consider either one of this. Or a CCA that is sports-based. Though at the back of my mind, I know I should not expect him to end up doing exceptionally well in any sports CCA. One reason is that while I did well enough to participate in the national compe

A couple of days ago, my son surprised my wife. It was my wife's birthday. Now, I did not have the opportunity to go together with him to Popular, so there was no card. Of course, my wife did not mind that a bit, though we joked as a family that we were not even giving a card to my wife. When I picked him up from school the day before, I was shocked. He actually produced a birthday card for his mum. It was made by the school teachers and his classmates! I could see the childish scrawl of his classmates wishing my wife happy birthday! Apparently, this little man had gone to school and managed to convince his teachers to draw a birthday card for mother. Either that, or the school had some time to burn and decided to make use of that time to draw a birthday card.  Regardless, my wife is touched that at least he made the effort to declare his desire to make a birthday card for his mother. So, presenting the birthday card.

The kids playing Xbox 360 The other day, I chanced upon my son's Minecraft game. He had this underground home that was unbelievable. It had doors, a library and other things that a house might have. I was very impressed. After all, he is only six. I never thought that a six year old would actually build a library. I know he has been watching Minecraft videos, but I did not realise that learns anything from these videos. So today, I thought I wanted to take a look at his 'world'. He was swimming with his buddies (the children of my wife's friend) so I took the iPad and opened the game. I could not find his underground home, so I searched for it by entering a nearby hole. But I could not find it. Needless to say, I continued to poke around, hoping to find it. Eventually, I went deeper and deeper underground. And I got lost. And I fell into lava. Because it was set in creative mode, my avatar was not killed by lava. Instead I got stuck. Then I panicked. I spend t

Lucas with his mum's iPad mini Recently, an article appeared in one of the Facebook pages I liked that I found disturbing. The author of this article (which I will not link to - call me biased, but I do not want such ideas to be perpetuated) was totally against the idea of handhelds for children under the age of 12. I was really surprised by this - I do teach in a school that has children under 12 and we do use the iPads in the classrooms. Nevertheless, I clicked the article and read it (I always force myself to read articles that go against my own beliefs because I think it creates a critical mind). I realised that some of the arguments she listed were actually false dichotomies - they did not allow for alternate reasonings. She argues that handhelds delay development probably because the children do not move and exercise while watching or playing games on the handheld. It is a good point, but in another part of the article, she notes down that children below 12 can safely

Captain America Shield. Made by the dad. Our usual night time schedule is actually not too ideal for my son. He sleeps too late, and I feel that he does not get enough sleep sometimes. Unfortunately for him, both my wife and my schedule does not really allow for early sleep times like 8pm or even 9pm. I work till 8.30pm and my wife sometimes works even later. This is because she works for a transnational company and needs to have conference calls with her European and American counter-parts. Fortunately, these calls can be taken at home. As a result, he usually sleeps around 10.30pm; though sometimes it extends to 10.45pm. This is something we need to address next year when he enters primary one. Even though the current situation is not good, I guess all of us have to adjust. We do try to let him sleep until the very last possible minute before waking him up for school. One of thing bad habits my son has is watching too much iPad. At least I think it is too much; though he obv

In my previous post about spelling woes , I talked about the three components of successful spelling - knowledge of phonemes & phonics, knowledge of spelling rules and memorisation & practice. This is a follow-up post in which I am going to introduce strategies for helping children spell. These set of strategies is actually based on Webb's Depth of Knowledge . The basic premise is that different activities are of different cognitive complexity. And the higher the cognitive complexity, the more likely the knowledge gets retained in long-term memory. It's actually very logical when you think about it. Who is going to understand or memorise a piece of information or concept better - one who has just read and understood it or one who has understood it and is able to rephrase and teach it to another person? Obviously the latter, who clearly has performed a task that is cognitively more complex. Enough of theory, let me give you practical advice! These activities are

The last weekend was spent at F1 with my son. My wife had refused to come with us, so it was just the two of us. It was my son’s first live F1. Actually it was mine too. I never really fancied watching F1 live – firstly, I watched the Macau Grand Prix before and motorsports was never my thing and secondly, I always thought that F1 wasn’t that exciting.  It only turned exciting when there was a crash.  Nevertheless, my son was quite enthusiastic, so I brought the tickets. Of course one of the objectives of bringing my son there was because of entertainment. He had always been fascinated with cars since young, despite the fact that his dad was not a car fanatic. So he was excited whenever he saw sporty cars on the road (he must be extremely disappointed that my car came original without any changes at all and looked like a typical sedan car). But back in my mind, I wanted to expose him to different experiences – travelling, exhibitions etc. From my own experience as a teacher, studen

I do not want to keep this blog limited to English, but to talk about my experience with educating my son in the various subjects he takes in school. One of the subjects he takes is of course, Chinese Language, being a Singaporean of Chinese origin. Because we seldom spoke to him in Mandarin when he was young, his Chinese Language is not very strong. Not to mention, he was a late speaker and we boosted his speaking with quite a bit of Speech Therapy, which is English based. As a result, he spoke Mandarin with a western accent. We send him to Berries for enrichment and it helped him quite a bit. His childcare probably did as well. Besieged by all sides However, there was something about his childcare's Chinese Language programme that I thought did not make sense. One of the things that did not make sense to me was the choice of idioms. The idioms the school chose to teach was very historical in nature - in other words, they were formed because of some historical event in Anc

Some parents dislike their children using a smartphone or a tablet. They think that their children are spoiling their eyes, or wasting their time inside the house rather than going doing outdoor play. While their concerns are valid, I do believe that technology can play a part in our children's education. Technology, in moderation, and especially guided by an adult can be very useful in helping our children learn. Voice Changer There are two apps I found quite useful in helping my son spell. One of them is called Voice Changer.  What you can do with it is to ask your child to spell the word and record it using the app. Once it has been saved, your child can press the icons to modify his voice. Your child can make himself sound like a mouse, a ghost, with helium and so on. It is definitely lots of fun to experiment with all the different voices! The constant listening to the audio recording of the word being spelt in a fun way really helps him to remember the word. You can use

In the middle of this year, my son's childcare started to give him spelling. To be honest, I have never given any spelling test to my students. Apparently, secondary school students do not need any spelling help. My own experience of spelling is... Well, it has been such a long time, I cannot remember it anymore. I suspect, though, that it involved canning when I did not achieve a satisfactory grade. Needless to say, I was not every sure how to teach my son spelling. I poured through pages and pages of research. To my surprise, spelling was not as simple as I thought it was. I always thought that I could spell because of my frequent usage of English (the less frequent I used a word, the harder it was for me to spell it). However, it was also apparent that I subconsciously used phonics when spelling less familiar words. I also recalled some basic spelling rules that had been buried deep inside my brain while doing my reading. In other words, spelling is not only the matter of me

The idea behind this blog festered at the back of my head for quite some time. It began when I started to think of teaching my son, Lucas. Now, I am an experienced secondary school teacher. Ask me how to write an argumentative essay or understand a difficult comprehension passage and I can give you some tips. But teach a 5 year old the basics of phonics, letter recognition, spelling etc... Truly, I can tell you that I was lost. As I did research on teaching my son, I came across many educational resources. I really learnt a lot. The research told me that childcare and primary school teachers needed to put in lots of efforts. Maybe, even a bit more effort than a secondary teacher. Secondary school teachers polish gems to make them shine. But childcare and primary school teachers create the gems. Anyway, I will be writing about my journey in learning how to teach really young kids. I enjoy researching and applying this knowledge. I hope you can all join me in this journey.