Our Little Smarties's blog

Finding the Right Preschool

For mothers like us with preschool-aged children, it can be difficult to decide whether to place our children in a pre-school to prepare them for kindergarten. For working mothers, it seems practical to send their children to preschool during work hours. For stay-at-home mothers, they may have different opinions. Whatever it is, searching and finding the most appropriate preschool can be a daunting task.  

For me, I went through this situation last year, when my son was 2+ years old. I couldn’t decide whether I should send him to preschool when he turns 3. By the time I finally decided to do so, I missed out big time. When I called various preschools around Sept last year, I found out that they were mostly full for year 2010 intake.

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Flashcard FAQs

Recently, a few blog readers wrote to me with questions about practicing flashcards as well as making them. So, I decided to write this post to share my knowledge and personal experiences.

Purposes of flashcards:
Flashing the cards in a high speed activates our child’s right brain and empowers their memory ability. When we flash the picture cards, we read out the words at the same time.

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First Anniversary in The Shichida Method

A few of my blog readers e-mailed me and asked me for comments on The Shichida Method. After evaluating this program for a year, I do have a few positive comments to share with all of you. My son started this program a year ago when he was 10 months old.
 
This term, July – Sept 09, marks his first anniversary in The Shichida Method. However, I don’t have any amazing incident to share in terms of his extraordinary achievements as compared to other children. I don’t expect him to turn genius within a year. Neither am I expecting any fantastic results from him.
 
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All About Maids

In today’s busy world, hiring a domestic helper is probably the best way to reduce our workloads and to regain some time for ourselves. Out of ten working mothers, I would say eight of them have a domestic helper at home. The challenge here is to find a competent, reliable and trustworthy helper. It is not easy at all!
 
A good helper eases our responsibilities at home, but if treated improperly, she can be a time-bomb too. Having said that, bringing a complete stranger into our house is no simple task. Besides the lack of privacy, we need to know what to expect from each other and how to deal with the daily conflicts.
 
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Children's Birthday Cakes

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The birthday cake is always the center of attraction in a birthday party. This cake sits in a place of honor, with beautiful candles glowing on top it, as we sing the “Happy Birthday” song. After the birthday song and all the oooh-and-aaah are over, it’s time to cut and taste how delicious the cake is.

Besides the taste, we also need to consider the shape, color, size and design of the birthday cake. If the birthday cake has a theme or cartoon characters, the children will definitely love it. It is better to decorate the birthday cake using the favorite color of the birthday boy or girl.

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Take a Moment to Hug Your Child

Most parents love their children more than their own lives. But sometimes, in the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, we are too busy to notice that our children need a more loving emotional connection with us.

Do we show our love and compassion to our children everyday? If no, please take a moment to hug and kiss your child now.

We, as parents, do menial tasks for our children everyday to prove our love for them. We take care of them, cook for them, send them to school, tuck them to sleep etc.  But to our children, they may not be able to ‘feel’ our love and the emotional connection from all these daily activities.

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Books for Toddlers

My wonderful, creative and active 21-month-old son absolutely adores books. Every night when we reach home, he will quickly walk into my room to take his books. We will sit together – he flips the pages while I read to him. This makes me extremely happy. It’s a good bonding time for us. 

 

The credit goes to the books as they are fun and very stimulating. (and me too! because I bought them. Ahem!) Choosing the age-appropriate books is very important. For young toddlers between 18 – 24 months of age, I feel that these books are quite suitable for them:

 

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