My ABC's - First Poem Recital In Class

our ever reliable wall and the ever reliable manila paper

My little miss preschooler is going to do her first poem recitation in class today. We worked hard to memorize this simple poem for almost a week and I fervently hope her efforts pay off later. If not, she knows it's okay. At least it's good to give it a try.

Eversince she started preschool, we get the same feedback every quarter. To work on her confidence because she tends to be extremely shy and would refuse to answer questions when overcame with shyness. I once mentioned this to her pedia but was told she's probably just borne with that temperament and when she's adjusted to the school set up already she will overcome it on her own. 

Guess what? Towards this last few weeks of 2012 and especially when new year hit, she started showing signs of 'coming out of her cocoon' so to speak. She became even more verbal. I can remember several instances where she would pull the phone from us when we're talking to her grannies (as opposed to her previous dislike of talking to relatives over the phone). Of course, we still had to reprimand her for being rude but to us that's a good sign that she's now willing to talk more, engage with other people more. And I guess the best change that I've noted would be her opening up to talk about school more often. 

I will have to schedule another talk with her class adviser but I hope she noticed the improvements on our little miss just like we did.

Anyways, I'm excited to hear about how her recitation turned out today. Success or not, I do hope she would still willingly share it with us later. 

To mommy-friends who are parents to preschoolers, care to share your tricks on how to teach your kids to familiarize and memorize several paragraphs for activities like this? I actually had a difficulty taking off with this activity because I was struggling with concept of memorization. I was never good at it (I'm more of a logical thinker, I can retain things if I understand the entire concept) so I knew I am going to be lousy at teaching it. I tried to accompany it with signs (the little miss learned baby signing when she was still a baby so it would have been easy) but I didn't find time to research on how to sign the entire poem so I gave up after 2 lines. I know this is just the start of many other 'memorization' activities so I'm hoping to learn other techniques before we take on the next one.

Teacher's Day Seatwork

In the lobby of the kid's preschool building  the teachers maintain this artwork 'show-off' board where each of the preschool sections would take turns posting their class's top artwork pieces on special projects. I only came to know of this recently.

Mommy oh, di na lumalagpas pagko color ko!

Here's a photo of my little miss proudly showing her completed artwork from the Teacher's Day celebration last October 5th. This was the second time that one of her artworks made it to the board. The first one she showed to her dad but the daddy forgot to take a photo of it, I didn't see what it was. So yesterday, she made sure Ate Inday took a snap of her and her 'masterpiece' to show to me later.

If you're proud of yourself little girl, WE - daddy and me - are even prouder.

Arts-N-Crafts: Birthday Card Project

I recently signed the little miss  up for this birthday card group exchange with 3 other kids. I posted the background story here.

Having recently reacquainted myself with the wonderful FUN world of art and crafts (read: handmade everything), I thought I'd raise the bar a notch higher make handmade cards instead. Ambisyosa. Yes, that's me. This little miss's mommy.

I also wanted the kid to remember this card exchange and I thought doing the cards ourselves would definitely leave a dent on her memory. (Well, we won't know till next year if my experiment turned out to be a success. Of course that's discounting the fact that she still doesn't have a full grasp of dates nor of time yet. Funny mommy, yes again that's me)

So anyways, I thought it was going to be easy peasy. But just as we were about to start the project, I realized I don't know where or how to start. I don't even know how I'd want the cards to look like nor what materials I should use. Thank God there are super women like (who else) Martha Stewart! So yes, I got the inspirations from her (not ashamed to admit just this once).

So I zeroed in on affordable (read: cheap) materials and majority of which I hope is already in my crafts box. I just bought a pack of kraft folders and colored pens. And yes, I am proud to say, that the rest of the materials  we already have on hand.

The materials we used for this project are as follows:

- short kraft folders (bought a pack of 10 for P35, if i remember correctly)
- transparent alphabet stickers (P49/pack)
- craft envelopes (on sale at national bookstore, pack of 10 for P8.50)
- leftover felt cloth from my holiday project last year
- beads also a left over from my holiday project
- colored yarns and threads
- craft scissors
- crayons
- construction paper
- ribbons also a left over from my holiday project
- permanent marker

Here's how the cards looked like before we personalized them:

let it be on record that we worked on these for 2 weekends.
and had to do several trial and errors before we finally got them right.

The little miss also made her own version of the birthday cards and we're sending them along with these. All 3 kids get their own personal cards from Maia. I just hope they will be able to pick up the message from those cards. Here's a sample of her card masterpiece (and we're really proud of this. we would want to keep  and frame them but well, she made it for the other kids so it's really not ours to keep):

I initially wanted to do the card messages using watercolor but it might take me one more week to finish so I went with the ever reliable permanent market instead. Kid was proud of what we did. And I hope A, M and J will love them too!