RED

Recently, I tried to put in a bit more thoughts on the activities I do at home with JD. Since having Chloe, I have had the opportunity to take extra time off from work , thus allowing me to focus more energy at home, the children and primarily for the family.

It has been a good change of pace though. It took me a while to adjust but now I really enjoy this special time I have.

Last week it occured to me that once in a while I should blog down on the activities we do. Our theme for the next few weeks are based around colours. Last week's colour was RED. It was JD's favourite colour! As you guess, he couldn't get enough of it.

We used crepe paper, cards, cut them out into shapes of tomatoes. We cut out strips of crepe paper, rolled them into balls, and glued them on. Then JD got creative and smarter, and just glued a piece of crepe paper on, then with my help trimmed the edges off nicely. But he still prefered crayons, and coloured the biggest tomato in red.

Doing craft was just part of an exercise. What I wanted to achieve was getting JD to learn Mandarin along the way. In that activity alone, I taught him to say and recognise:

红色, 西红柿, 大, 小

We learned about size comparisons, superlatives, with the use of his Lego blocks and building up various buildings of different heights before getting into some demolitions fun! It was much more fun that way as it involves him learning while doing the activity.

The next day, I cut up some apples and encouraged him to do some stamping with the cut apples. Once again, we went back to learning 红色, 红萍果, 萍果, 萍果汁. I became cheeky and taught him to say Cili Padi, and that his mommy used to have a "cili padi" temper :) His favourite part was painting his hands red and stamping them on sheets of paper. Chloe found it very amusing! And she also contributed to a set of hand prints too!

On another afternoon, we made Mr. Red Pepper taken from this site. It was a simple task of colouring, cutting, gluing. Once again he learned about 红色, 红辣椒. We also talked about the taste of chilli, I showed him a chilli plant, how we can use it in cooking and etc. It was a lot of fun talking about cooking the chilli as JD and I both love cooking and eating! Here's JD trying to give me a thumbs up for this craft!

So there you go, it was our week of RED. This week's theme is BLUE which I will blog about if I get a chance.