Like swimming, Daddy view biking as a fundamental life skill. Imagine, if our kids cannot swim or ride, how much fun will they be missing !

Step 1.
Mount bike, kids must be able to tip toe on bike.
If bike frame is too short, kid will struggle to peddle.

Step 1a. Get a helmet. Our kids are not as rugged as yesterday's kids, and we parents do not want them to get unnecessary bumps keke

It all started when my child blurted out one day "It's not fair!" when she didn't get her way. I ignored the statement and took it as one of her pertulant outbursts when things don't go her way. Until the "not fair" outbursts became more frequent and over the smallest stuff that I began to sit up and take note.

So one day when she uttered the infamous words again, I decided to give her a piece of my mind. I told her in a firm but calm tone, "Baby, you're right. Life really isn't fair, that is why you have food to eat, clothes to wear, and papa and mama to love you, when there are little children in other poor countries who don't have all these." It seemed to work as the frequency of her "not fair" outbursts have magically reduced. In fact, I hardly hear it lately.

Many people make resolutions for the New Year. For me, I prefer to do reflection of the existing year. Previously I have made many resolutions and always fall short of it, so for a change I decided that reflection is more suitable in my case.

This year has been an exciting year for me in regards to parenting. I have implemented some positive things and also made mistake in some areas. As I reflect back, here are a list of hits and misses, and I leave it for you to decide what is suitable for your parenting style.

Starting a New Hobby together with your Child

Dear Parents, have you come across these commonly given feedback on your child's answers in Science open-ended questions; "The answer is not to the point", "The concept is not present in the answer" "The answer is not structured well" ... Often, this is a result of your children understanding a concept or topic but being unable to express themselves to attain the marks they deserve.

Here are some tips that your child may find useful in helping them structure their answers. Please understand that these tips are not exhaustive and may not encompass all open-ended questions. Nevertheless, I have found it quite useful when helping children to structure their Science open-ended answers.
 

Here are some common sentence structures your child can adopt when answering open-ended questions. They can use the question stems and the context to help them identify the sentence structures.
 

‘What’ Questions are often questions that test your child on identifying the correct fact. The words that identify these questions are as follows.

Quite a few parents have come to me with the question of whether they should send their children for abacus classes.  From my discussion with them, I gathered that on one hand, many are impressed with the apparent effect abacus classes have on the speed of doing mental sum; on the other hand, they have also heard stories of how children get confused as abacus method is vastly different from number bonds, which seems to be the method of choice being taught at primary level.

I thought I would take the opportunity to clarify on this and hopefully to reach out to as many parents as possible with regards to this confusion. 

What is Number Bond?

A recent survey shows that Singaporeans are generally happy, scoring a 6.6 on a scale of 1 to 10. And according to Dan Buettner, best-selling author of The Blue Zones and Thrive - Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way, "Singapore is the happiest place in Asia".

However, Singaporeans have rated their personal savings, or the lack of it, as the area in which they are most unhappy with, according to a research study titled The Happiness Report recently released last month.

The study, which was conducted by Grey Group, also revealed the top 5 things that Singaporeans were happiest about, with 78% citing Singapore as the best place to live in the world, followed by close family ties, spirituality, social support networks, and personal time being the fifth on the happiness index. Interestingly, the study also discovered that men were happier than women at the workplace.

Can happiness be bought with a price tag? Some would say "yes", judging from the long queue of thousands of people, some of whom stayed overnight, outside the new H&M flagship store when it was launched here.

I am not ashamed to admit that I am a Potato Parent. I am not pleased to admit it... but I am not ashamed. See... I didn't get to choose how I was educated. Unlike many in Singapore, I was never given the opportunity to learn Chinese. I spent the better part of my childhood outside of Singapore. So, I learnt French instead.

My children have to learn Chinese. I am fully supportive of this. If the government decided to move away from bilingual education and people had the choice to take or not to take Chinese, I would still opt for my kids to take Chinese.

But Potato Children like mine find it really difficult to excel in the Chinese language because they do not evolve in a Chinese reading milieu. In the past 10 months, I have experimented with some Potato Methods for Learning Chinese and my son has made progress. In this post I would like to share some things I discovered about the process of learning Chinese - and why Potato Children like mine find the language almost impossible to master... and what parents can do to make the impossible possible.