Crafts: Projects for October 2010

It has been another lazy month for us... anyway, here are what Ian has been doing for this past month...

Paper Plate Fish - We read the book Rainbow Fish and I decided to let Ian create one (the one on the right).  First, he used crayons to colour the fish as he liked, while I helped to divide out a portion for the mouth.  After he has finished his colouring, I let him cut out the tail and he drew the eyes.  I stapled the tail to the body of the fish, then tore out little scraps of aluminum foil that he pasted with glue onto the body of the fish.  We found another piece of paper plate around and he said he wanted to make one more fish, so I let him.  To my surprise, he enjoyed doing this craft which was simple in my opinion.

Frog and Tortoise - I was trying to introduce the concept of mixing yellow and blue paint to get green paint, and to avoid wasting the paint, I let Ian paint the colour onto 2 paper plates.  I had prepared the cut-out legs, eyes and other body parts in advance, and Ian helped to paste the body parts onto the paper plates. 

Pig and Elephant - Ian first painted the 8 paper plates, egg carton, and toilet rolls in pink.  After that, Hubby helped to glue the individual parts together as it was not easy to handle.  This craft was not very successful in my opinion, as perhaps we should have used more plates to make it look more proportionate with the legs.   

The 2nd craft was from Chinese craft book with punch out templates.  Ian helped to attach the body parts of the elephant with glue.

Cheap Homeschooling: Dressing Frame

I made a simple buttons dressing frame for Ian to learn how to button and unbutton.  What it had cost -  a $6 frame, scraps of cloth, huge buttons that I found amongst my scrapbooking materials, and about an hour of work at the sewing machine (my first attempt to sew button-holes with this machine).

He has started practising on it for the past 2 months or so, and it was only recently that he started to apply this skill in real life.  Now, he is able to take off his school uniform, although he still needed a little help buttoning it up in the morning. 

Once he is more dexterous with this skill, perhaps I could try to let him learn how to tie a ribbon?

"Eat M, Okay?"

"Eat M, Okay?". 

Initially, I did not get what Ian was trying to tell me, until once, I followed his eyes and saw the big "M" signboard - McDonald's.  Every time we passes by an outlet, or when we tell Ian that we are going to eat, he will say these 3 words.

He loves their fries, much to my chagrin.  Whenever I am in a hurry to fetch him or have run out of time to have my lunch before fetching him, I will resort to fast-food.  Sometimes, I bring him with me to buy my lunch, and he gets to eat my fries, which appears to be a feast to him as he savours each bite. 

Most of the time, we finished the meal in the car before going home.  Sometimes, if we do bring the food home, he will place the fries in front of him, followed by placing my coke next to his fries, and begin his feast. 

Our Long-Awaited Maid...

I wooted this at the beginning of the month, and it seemed a long wait before the DHL courier finally brought our robotic maid to us yesterday afternoon.  We quickly went out to get the local voltage charger and fed it with power for 16 hours.  After putting Ian to bed just now, I eagerly made it perform the very first task for our house...

Verdict:  I had expected it to leave the floor pretty wet, but this is wetter than expected.  Perhaps if I left it to clean the same area, the last cycle would have dried the floor.  It could not reach the corners, but it did a pretty neat job of sucking up long hair and random dirt and dust on the floor.  For the price I had paid ($310), it is good, as it can take away some of the housework from us. 

However, after the robot had completed its task, I had to dismantle the tank, the filter, and the brush cleaning head to clean up.  The water for the first mission was black (showed how dirty our house was).  It was quite a chore to clean up the filter and cleaning head as a lot of hair, dirt, and even bits of papers that Ian tore up, was stuck inside.  After that, I wonder how long it would take to dry up, before it can embark on the next mission?  Perhaps because this is a lower end model, so it could not clean up the whole house.  But, it is good enough for us.  Hopefully, with a cleaner house, Ian and I can stop suffering from allergy-related problems!

As a side note, I have not seen how Ian will react to our new family member. Hopefully, he will not abuse it!

Surprises Today

Our little boy gave me many surprises today!

1. When he came back from school, he unbuttoned his uniform without any help from me.  We have been teaching him how to handle buttons for about 2 months, and finally, he did it on his clothes.  Hopefully, this will not turn out to be a one-off event, and he can continue to do that tomorrow and so forth.

2. After his shower, he went to the first-aid box to take a plaster to paste over the little cut on his leg.  Although he has been able to put on a plaster properly (he has even helped to paste one over a mosquito bite on me before), it was a pleasant surprise still when he came to the kitchen with the empty box to throw it away.

3. While I was changing the bedsheets, Ian has become my little helper.  He helped me pull the bedsheet at the other corner of the bed, and took the dirty linens to the laundry basket in the kitchen.  He even helped to place the pillows at their usual places.

4.  Voila!  That is a portrait that he drew while I was not looking.  When I asked who it was, he said "Mommy!".  It was a surprise to me, because it did not look as weird as his previous sketches of our family members.

Development Assessment: 30 Months

We visited the speech and occupational therapists today.  The occupational therapist explained the result of the profiling that we had completed last month.  Ian fared pretty normal except for his auditory processing, which showed that he had a slightly higher threshold for noise tolerance, which meant we needed to put in more effort to catch his attention if we were talking to him. The therapist mentioned that he could be 'discharged' since we did not have any major concern. 

The speech therapist also mentioned about discharging him soon, perhaps after a doctor's review.  She was happy with Ian's explosive progress since our first visit just a few months ago.  Ian could now attempt to join a few words together in his effort to communicate.  And surprisingly, he could pronounce some difficult sounds such as "train" (the "tr" sound is supposed to be quite advanced for his age).  She was also happy that he could recognise a specific vegetable such as broccoli during the play time.  We pointed out that he is having difficulty pronouncing "fish" instead of "bish", and she told us that this was pretty normal for someone who just began to talk.  But strangely, Ian could say "four" and "five" correctly.

After the next review, if everything is good, we probably could go for a review again in another 6 months.

At his childcare, his teacher also brought up that Ian's progress in talking was good.  He was starting to imitate the words that the teacher said. 

Both of us also found that he has become pretty talkative.  Sometimes, he would wake up in the morning and talk to himself while he played alone.  He also loves to praise himself "well done" for something that he has done.