MEW'S HAPPY WEEK

Last week was the Spring break here and Mew did not have to go to school, hoorray!!! So she just stayed at home with us and enjoyed playing games alone or with parents.

I took Mew to the Grande Bibliotheque with the aim to getting her and myself library subscription cards but unfortunately we forgot our proof of address and finally came home in vain. However, I did get a remote access to the library's electronics resources simply by filling in an online form. It is in fact more useful for us since we might not have enough time to go to the library in person but we could use the library's portal with the authentication to get the access to various interesting database. Youth Space or L'espace jeune is undoubtedly among the most favourite destination for Mew during her learning journey here.

I babysat Mew and Helen, her best friend, for two mornings. We played some simple games to reinforce their French vocabulary. Helen's French now appears to be better than Mew, mostly thanks to her special passion for learning everything and also because of Mew's 2-month absence from the French school. We will need to work with the private tutor to help Mew more in improving her French oral communication skills.

A good news is that Mew seems to become better with her mathematics addition skills after some practice with me. Although she does confuse sometimes between numbers such as 19 and 91 but generally she can presently add up to 20 without much problems. I used the game board of Snake and Ladder game to teach her to count up to 100. Then we taught her to do some basic additions using her fingers. The important thing we taught her at the beginning is the communitative characteristic of addition problems, where 5+8 = 8+5. Based on that characteristic, we instructed her to focus on the bigger number in the addition problem, thinking of it as an already-got quantity and subsequently adding the remaining amount on top of that quantity (she might use her fingers at first but would gradually wean off this habit). With a lot of repetitions, Mew becomes quicker in obtaining the result for an addition problem. We together cut out a lot of blank flash cards (in fact, tiny pieces of card) and I wrote down an addition problem in one side such as 9+4= and on the other side of the same card Mew wrote down the correct result. When finishing making the whole set, we put them all into a plastic container (a blueberry container - good habit of recycling, lol). Mew drew one card at a time, looking at the addition problem and without seeing the reverse side of the card needed to tell me the result within 5 seconds. If she was correct, she could keep her card and put it into another "Correct" container. If not, the card would be put into an "Incorrect" container and we would concentrate on practising more with those "tricky" problems. So far this method has worked fine for us. I hope that Mew would be perfect in adding up to 20 soon so that we could move to the stage of learning to fill in the missing number in an addition problem before attacking the subtraction subject.

This week we also tried a new board game: "Sorry!" game which is in fact a kind of Horse race game in our country. A simple game using cards to tell your moves instead of a dice. Mew could of course learn to count in this game. However, similar to the other board game we mentioned earlier (Destines, Le Jeu de la vie), this game is not really a strategic one and mostly based on luck. Mew won the last time we played and that motivated her very much, lol.

We also had a wonderful night at the Centre Bell to watch the Disney on Ice Princess performance. It was a marvel indeed and we did not regret spending money for this special treat for the whole family. Although our seat row was a little backward but it allowed us to have a panorama view instead. Mew enjoyed the show very much and her most favourite character was Cindrella as usual.

Oh we almost forget to mention our puppetry night show during La Nuit Blance 2 weeks ago. It was fantastic! We were so admired at the creativity and the talent of the participating artists. I will add more information later when I have more free time.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, we watched with great enthusiasm the glass sculpture demonstrations by Gérald Collard, a glass-blower. It’s a educational activity that is rather out of the ordinary. From just a small tube of glass, he created various objects amazingly. Even us as adult audience could only say "Wow!". After that, three of us cheerfully enjoyed the drop-in Art workshop with the topic "Seeing through Colour": there we created our own plastic glass in transparent colour. With a piece of paper, we drew whatever our imagination can think of and then put it inside a plastic glass, copying our picture on the outside of the glass by permanent ink markers. At the end, we all were so proud of our work of art and we did bring them home for a display.

Well, so that's enough for a summary of the Spring break week activities in our family. Today Mew starts going back to school and our rhymth of life changes back to normal. Excitedly looking forward to summer break, yeahhh!