Learning At Home: The Big Blue Sea

Since I started work, I do not have the luxury of spending entire days with my two little girls, so I structured the learning at home activities into month-long themes, so that the Bees can be more immersed into what they learned over a longer period. 

Last month, the theme was "Oceans and the seashore". Most of my themes are inspired by the Disney movies my Bees loved to watch. This theme was decided after I saw how enthralled they were with "Finding Nemo"! It is a good way to link their favourite cartoons into the real world they live in as well. 

I also decided to pull Big Bee into the picture. Above all those academic work that I had to revise with her, I thought it might be more holistic and interesting if she can learn things out of the school curriculum (read: more science and geography rather than focusing purely on English, Math and Chinese). This poses a good challenge because I have to customise activities to cater to both Big Bee and Little Bee. But I am thankful because Big Bee had been very upfront and forthright in ideas and suggestions on what we can do to engage her interest. She was thrilled when she realised she was part of the programme too! 

With the oceans theme, we explored everything from living things on the seashore to sea-faring animals like gigantic whales and miniscule starfishes. 

For Big Bee, I extended her learning experience to the solar system, as she started asking more and more questions from "Why is the ocean blue?" to "Why is the sky blue?". We spent one quiet evening when Little Bee was asleep to understand the galaxy we call home, and learned about the different characteristics of all the gorgeous planets in our solar system. She started asking me about the existence of aliens and her questions just kept spiralling beyond my limited knowledge! Still, it was great fun and I must admit, it is a wonderful journey for me too, to be able to learn alongside my daughter whilst she is absorbing all these fascinating information about the beautiful world we live in. 

For Little Bee, it was more of linking the oceans theme to academic basics like learning about certain alphabets (eg, W for whale, S for starfish and C for crab), letter tracing and independent writing, as well as number recognition and counting up to 10 (as opposed to rote recitation of numbers). Not to forget the highly gratifying craft works to hone her fine motor skills. Although she did not ask as many questions as her jie-jie, she is starting to know (I hope!) the different sorts of sea creatures living in and out of the oceans.

Her starfish collage and letter tracing of "S" 

 

Letter tracing of "W" for whale, walrus and water

I did some activities with them together, like reading books to them on ocean animals, using the ubiquitous world wide web to search for photos of sea creatures and painting oceans and seashore scenes. I hope these can be channels for them to learn from each other and to bond closer as sisters. 

Big Bee came up with a fantastic idea of creating an ocean dictionary where we can list by alphabetical category all the ocean-related creatures! We spent a merry afternoon on this. For Little Bee, I did not limit the alphabetical categories to sea creatures as it might be too difficult for her. 

Big Bee's dictionary of the ocean - cover page

Ocean animals for categories "B" and "C": we had to do some research through encyclopedias and books to find some of the animals!

Little Bee's version of an amateur dictionary. Big Bee and I drew pictures and words, and she added in some of her scribblings like the balloon-looking thing in "B" and the funny catface with a conical hat in "C" (I think she was trying to replicate the ears from the cat I drew).

We are still far from completing any comprehensive review about the ocean, but I thought it is high time to move on to a new theme (based on Big Bee's hint today) so that we can broaden our learning odyssey and in the near future, revisit this theme from a different perspective :) 

Big Bee and Little Bee had given some suggestions on what to learn this month (Big Bee proposed zoo or safari animals, Little Bee wanted farm animals...), so I am doing a bit of planning this week! 

Here was our final project for the ocean theme:

Monstrous-looking girls with bright orange hands after an evening of painting! 

Voila! Big Bee's crimson crab. She toiled over sticking the legs in meticulous precision!

Little Bee's crab - I added in the numbers in the legs and claws to teach her number recognition, counting and ordering. As well as reinforcing the letter "C" for crab.