Learning At Home: Green For Nature

I am trying very hard to teach colours to Little Bee, who had not grasped colour identification very well yet. Her default answer whenever I asked her "what colour is this?" would always be "blue!" spontaneously. If the object in question is not blue, I would frown and asked her to think harder, and she would then observe the object with a keener eye before uttering "yellow!" or "orange!" or "black!" (sometimes the wrong answer!).

So, the week before, I was teaching her the colour green. It was an easy colour to identify as I used real life elements like the ubiquitous trees and plants just outside our house as examples. She loves leaves and flowers, so it was pretty easy to let her associate green with omniscient Mother Nature. For breakfast, she ate fruit loops and I got her to identify and eat up the green loops first. We also read Dr Seuss' "Green Eggs And Ham" although she did not have the patience to finish the whole book. And we painted with green paint. 

Eat the green fruit loops first! 

A pleased Little Bee after drawing a green tree...or is it a balloon? 

We decided to create a small orchard of fruit trees - or rather, just 2 trees! An orange tree and an apple tree. I cut out the shapes of the fruits and trees, and she painstakingly pasted the fruits neatly onto the trees. For the orange tree, she had this queer obsession of sticking the oranges around the perimeter of the tree. As for the apple tree, she patiently drew the stalks of the apples herself, which were a tad too long, so the apples looked like cherries!

We then stuck the completed foliage onto used toilet rolls, and voila! Standing 3D fruit trees! She gave the apple tree to jie-jie who was so pleased with this unexpected present after school. 

Check out how she stuck the oranges all around the perimeter of the tree! 

The next few days, the theme was extended to letter recognition of T (for tree) and L (for leaf) where she neatly traced these letters. I am happy that her writing skills had improved considerably recently. 

I also introduced the theme of insects, more specifically, ants, as she was very interested in ants. So I dug out one old story book of Big Bee that talked about ants, and Little Bee was fascinated by this book for days, often taking it out to read herself and I would see her in a corner, counting the immense number of ants in the book! 

Big Bee also wanted to dabble with the ants theme, so we created a craftwork for older kids - an ant maze! She drew the maze with lots of adorable intricate details, and I drew the ant. And remember our primary school days when we used magnets to create moving objects? Well, I stuck a magnet underneath the ant, and another magnet underneath the maze, and voila! A magical moving ant crawling by itself, finding its way home! Big Bee was fascinated by this maze, although Little Bee was not that interested. 

Big Bee's ant maze with the magnetic moving ant

We wrapped up this theme with Hubby's suggestion to go to the Jacob Ballas Children's Garden on a sweltering hot Sunday morning. We spent a couple of hours analysing all sorts of different plants like mosquito-repelling plants that Big Bee was amazed with (because she hates mozzies!), a gorgeous cherry tree (minus the famous blossoms) and even a quaint canopy of Chinese hu-lu plants! The girls had great fun, laughing - cheery and merry - running with their Papa across the lawns, meandering through the labyrinth, slithering down the slides. Great fun indeed!