Dec Holiday Camp - Cooking Party

Does your child want to be Chef of the day? In Dec, we had a really fun cooking party for our school children as well as outside children for a week.

Who's the instructor? I'm proud to say that it's me. Yes! Another hidden talent that I have which is baking. The children, all between the ages of 5-12, grouped into two, have a great time creating and baking, as well as playing fun games, watching pastry and bakery videos and taking home some nifty treats!

We did a lot of prep work buying all the ingredients, cooking utensils, aprons sewn and pre-making our adequate mix of recipes - banana muffins, easy cheesy chicken dippers, cupcakes, cookies, crepes, pizzas, etc to ensure that everything will turn out well on the actual lesson. On the actual day, everything that the children do started from scratch. They weight, measured their ingredients, they made the dough and broke the egg all by themselves with little help from adults. It's time to get messy !

We had the children assembling their own individual pizzas - bowls of sauce, cheese and toppings were passed around the table and yes, I think some of the children weren’t really thinking that they’d be eating these as they piled on loads and loads of tomatoe.

They were so creative with their cookies and seemed to have a great time making little treats that then went into the oven marked with their name, and into goodie bags to take home after the party. We ended our cooking party with lots of party treats eg strawbery ice-cream crepes, melon skewers and jellies.

Feb News

What a great first month of school. We have been transitioning into new routines at school, learning everyone’s names, making new friends and getting to know each other. Currently there are 13 children in Toddlers Group ages 2-3 and 13 children in Early Years Group ages 4-6. The Early Years Group is under the guidance of Ms. Ng and I. She graduated with a Business Degree and has a passion in teaching. We look forward to an exciting year ahead with the children. You may have noticed there are 4 children attending our Junior Educare as well. One of them is Ms. Sri’s son. We are very delighted about this new addition to the school as we are providing this service to children whose primary schools are around the neighbourhood.

Our first theme was All About Myself. We discussed about our senses, how to take care of our teeth, how many fingers we have on our hands, where we are from and how old we are. In Montessori environment, there are some basic expectations we have for the children such as we tell the children “walking feet” means walk safely and calmly in the environment, “indoor voices” means use gentle voices, no yelling across the environment. We constantly remind the children not to disturb others who are working and return materials in good order to shelves.

We will start our second theme with the study of Botany by introducing Plants & Flowers. We use the book The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle. It is a wonderful book to use especially for the younger children. Some of the activities planned for the children are, we will examine seeds, plant and compare different types of seeds, learn how seeds travel, learn how the stem carries water, learn the needs of plants, parts of plants and lots of art and crafts will be made with this theme. We encourage parents to participate with children by collecting different types of leaves and bring to school that we will press into a book.

To enhance our learning, the Early Years children will be going on a field trip to Tropical Spice Garden, Teluk Bahang Penang on Feb 25. The school does not have mass transportation so we rely on parent volunteers or teachers to transport our students to and from field trips. Further details will be sent out later on.

Birthday the Montessori Way

On 23rd Jan we celebrated Qian’s 2nd birthday. Glad that his busy parents were able to spend time organising a party for him. From the feedback from Qian's dad, he looked very excited and happy and this time he's aware that it's his birthday. I saw that too when I made a quick move downstairs to wish Qian Happy Birthday. No photos of Qian though, as I was upstairs teaching the Early Years. Ms. Sri was very happy with the children as they were able to follow the activity and the whole situation was very calm during the birthday. Hmm....that shows that our toddlers are growing up!!

Another birthday we celebrated was for Aden which was on 30th Jan. He is 2 years old too. We managed to do a Birthday Walk for Aden. A timeline of photos were shown to his friends and based on that we told stories to his friends. What sort of thing could he do when he was one? Sit up?.. Eat?.. Walk?.. Could he talk? We can see that this made the child feel so special.