READING AND LESSONS

Yesterday, the boys spent some time doing their lessons. Nikki is not very hard to teach because he is attentive and pays attention well. Ethan is a restless soul but the good thing about him is that he loves to read. So, I gave Ethan a bunch of books for him to browse while Nikki and I did a few pages of lessons in his workbook. Nikki is quite good with reading now. I think he has a wide vocabulary for his age. He has read his pre-school books many times and is now reading more lengthy stories. Yesterday, we did some picture sentences and he answered them all correctly. We also did some exercises on telling the time and so far, he got all the half-past times accurately. Today, we might try something else. Maybe science and writing and opposites. We do these things a little at a time because I don't want my boys to be fed up of learning.

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Ethan loves his books a lot. He's still in the stage where he finds books with colorful illustrations really interesting. He usually loves to sit on my lap and scream the pictures to me. But I taught him how to whisper the names softly instead and now, he does not yell in my ear everytime he identifies an object. Sometimes, when he's not sure of the picture, he'll ask me "What's this?" and when I tell him, he'll repeat it several times. He's so cute. I wish I were at Booksale so I could buy them more books. The children's books there are sooo cheap. When Nikki is bigger, I'll get him those discounted National Geographic magazines. They are so interesting and will be an important reference material for them when they are bigger. Although I know the internet is a good source of information, I don't want them to be too dependent on it.

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Today we will review nursery rhymes. I would love to have a CD of Filipino nursery rhymes. I suppose I'll just get one when we get back. It would be nice for the boys to sing in Tagalog too.

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It's hard to do arts and crafts here. We can't make a mess because this is really not our place and also the apartment here is carpeted. It's hard to do some painting and paper mache stuff. Sooo disappointing. It would have been nice to do some messy crafts once in a while. The most we could do is color and make paper cut-outs. I suppose I'll have to be creative in deciding what crafts we could do here.