the Moments: Some Sharing - Projects with Kids

Spending more quality time with my kids is one of my focuses for this year. Two incidents in last December have changed, significantly, my views about how I should live my life, or to be more exact, how I should live my life BETTER. These two incidents are just like a wake-up call. Although they made me extremely upset at the time, I'm feeling grateful that they happened. I have high hopes that 2012 will be a better year for me and my family!

When talking about spending time with kids, what is better than doing projects with them? Inspired by Charles' school work and Karen's alphabet project with her younger son, I have created two projects for my two little ones so that I can do something fun and meaningful with each of them.

For Abigail, who is now 2-1/2 years old, I made a 6" x 12" book using the Apple Jack paper by Sassafras. This line of paper is full of fun letters, bright colours and cute images. They are just perfect for this project.

I downloaded some alphabet work sheets from the web and cut them apart. Abby coloured the letters and images, and glued them on the book as she liked. This is how the A page looks like. The heart sticker was a little award for her for doing such a good job! :)

I'm doing two letters with her each week in addition to an Alphabet Workbook I picked up at Costco earlier. At this young age, she is VERY interested in "learning" as for her it's more like playing with crayons, glue, stickers and scissors. By the end of last year she had already recognized most of the upper case letters as well as the lower case letters. The credits all go to this little orange "laptop". She learned all the letters and numbers by playing with the little monkey in the laptop. Her brother did the exact same thing when he was a little older than 1-1/2 about 4 years ago.

Abby just loves this colourful book and shows to her brother whenever she's done a page. It's definitely a fun way to make use of my growing paper stash.

Charles has shown great interest in reading and spelling ever since he started kindergarten last September. And he is able to tell "stories" about his school days and to carry more meaningful conversations with us. Inspired by his school work, I have him draw "DIARY". I picked up a sketch book at a dollar store for him, and Charles decorated the cover himself.

Every day Charles draws one particular event/thing/people that makes him happy for the day, and then I help write down the exact words told by him. He started the Diary on January 20th. At that time, he had no idea how to spell January and just copied my writing.

He often writes some numbers, such as 2, 3 and 5, and letters, such as E, J and Z, backwards.

These drawings just make me smile. I haven't had the chance to take pictures of pages done in the last few days. After having written January for ten days, he's now remembered it by heart, which I didn't expect when asking him to write down the date for each page.

My goal is to do something fun and meaningful with my kids. So far so good. Both of them love what they are doing and keep showing off their great projects to each other!