New Chapter at TweedleWink Playhouse

I've been so uber busy at my new school - TweedleWink Playhouse. It combines right brain education with Montessori elements, and I can see the children just adore coming to school. And so do I! I really love school. There's a reason I am willing to travel so far to come to school - PASSION. It is my dream school. I love how the program is beautifully designed to blend the best of Montessori philosophy with right brain education. All children learn differently at different paces, thus we follow the child and let them lead the learning.

At the same time, the children are exposed to so much because a child's early years from birth to six are the period when they have the greatest capacity to learn.They are exposed to famous composers and classical music pieces, world cultures and foreign languages, science concepts, famous artists and art pieces, and so so so much more! 

Besides imparting knowledge, we focus a lot on character-building - encouraging them to be kind, helping them deal with frustrations, assisting them in building their confidence, encouraging them to be independent. It's a tough job, but I absolutely positively love it to bits!

These are some snapshots of what happens in school! :) 

Baking muffins when we visited England

Working on dinosaur montessori cards

Baking Italian bread

Cooking French toast

Working on Montessori Colour Box 3

Art appreciation: Paul Gauguin

Art Appreciation: Winslow Homer

Art Appreciation: Claude Monet

Learning about volcanoes 

Preparing ingredients to make ratatouille

We made ratatouille when we visited France

Having a puppet show

Love it? I know I do!

Currently...

THIS WEEKS THEMES:
LEARNING, GATHERING, GIVING, WORKING, PLAYING

Me:

LEARNING about Montessori for my work. Looking forward!

GATHERING my thoughts. Or rather trying to. Overwhelmed with thoughts of jobs and buying house and finishing work and saying goodbye. Good thing school break is coming up in two weeks!

GIVING gifts. To mothers. To teachers. To students. To friends.

WORKING hard!! With the parent teacher meeting coming up, it's time to type up reports and file up portfolios.

PLAYING with my iPad quite a lot haha. Playing puzzles mental challenge and stuff.

The kids:

LEARNING about animals this month. We just heard real animal sounds and it's really interesting. Real pigs don't actually say oink oink! I wonder who came up with that. Haha

WORKING and PLAYING with animal puzzles and all the cool apps I have on my iPad! Hahaha. Loving Wee Sing where you can listen to animal sounds and also sounds of musical instruments.

Currently

I am currently...

ADMIRING the Montessori method. I am reading about Montessori again, and her work is uber inspiring.

LOVING all the little ones in class. (Duh) haha.

CLEANING the classroom with dettol every day! Every toy and material. A lot of work, but it's a precautionary step to make sure the Evil Hand Foot Mouth Disease doesn't attack anyone!

CREATING a new theme board. May's theme is Animals and I'm doing animals under water!

IPad

Every teacher should have an iPad. Really. So that you can facebook instagram and check email in class. Haha no just kidding.

It's so uber convenient. When you are teaching new words, you don't need to prepare flashcards. Just google search. Children will enjoy looking at the ipad more than at flashcards too. Even though its the exact same picture. You don't need to print and laminate. You can enlarge the picture easily. Children have spontaneous questions? Just look it up online!
Teacher, what does a mango tree look like?
Wait ah, let me find the pic.
Wham, immediately you get the pic!

The apps are amazing and cheap. The kids and I are enjoying Letter School. Sometimes, we do it one by one, or two by two. Sometimes I use it as a whole class activity. They clap and cheer and are so excited to see the animations!

The iPad is the best gift I've gotten :)

Imagination

Children don't need expensive toys. They just need open ended materials and their imaginations!

Art

There's time for structured work, where everyone has the same end product.
And there's time for open ended art. The kids painted using cotton buds today. I think it's beautiful :)

Letter writing

I purchased my first apple app today...Letter School! It's educational, so it's ok. Haha. I downloaded the lite version first and let my students try it and they absolutely love it. Even I look forward to see what the animation will be. So I decided to buy the full version. It only costs 3 dollars, which is about RM9, and I think it's a good buy. I really believe that this is the new era of education and we must move forward and change our ways of teaching. This is definitely a really really fun way of learning how to write.

Which brings me to another point...how strictly should we follow the rules of letter formation? I realized that different apps sometimes show different letter formation, eg. when writing letter d, do you start with the line or start at the curve? What I learnt in college is the proper way is that you start at the curve.

Some books teach two separate strokes for a letter, eg. for letter a, you write the c first, and then lift up your pencil and draw the straight line, whereas what I learnt in college is that you do not lift up the pencil when writing.

When my lil bro saw my playing the app, he said, 'eh like that one meh? I write another way.' He writes capital letter E with the vertical line down first, then the bottom horizontal line then the top horizontal line, and finally the middle horizontal line.

At first I thought, yer, your teachers didn't teach you one meh. But then i pondered..does it matter??

Does it matter which 'y' you use? The curvy one? Or the straight one? Is one wrong and the other right? At the end of the day, children are bound to see both in words around them.

Does it matter whether you lift up your pencil or not? Some teachers say its easier for children to learn when it's in two strokes. At the end of the day, when children begin to write, they will write faster and naturally they will stop lifting up the pencil, right?

If they do not catch the proper formation, so what? In the end, you will still be able to see the letter, right? And isn't that the purpose of writing?

Of course, I will teach the 'proper' way of writing letters, but sometimes, if they lift up their pencil and write the letter in two strokes, I just close one eye. I think the children have more important things to do.