Mother's Day card

A mother's heart can only be filled with unimaginable joy when two little eyes are fixed on a piece of paper, while a little hand works hard while the head is bent down until the smile of satifaction spreads on her face. All because she wants to make her mummy happy on 'Happy Mother's Day'. Look at all the hearts she has made for her Mummy and Mummy hopes she knew that this 'ever strict' mom loves her so very very much.

Art for art's sake

Do you shop around for the best of drawing sheets and art paper for your little ones to express his/her art? Sometimes children can choose the wildest of places to sketch their hearts out.
My daughter has not only been tearing pages from notebooks to draw, besides regular drawing sheets, she loves drawing on all sorts of places and items around the house. Sometimes its the back of a visiting card, and sometimes also on her sister's hand.
Here Rhu drew on an airsick bag, probably we had kept on one of our journeys for our 'puky' little girls. Its a drawing of her little baby sister and herself. True, medium doesnt matter when art is on your mind.

Handwriting practice

DD loves drawing and making cards for everybody. Don't be surprised if you are greeted with a post-it note with some scribble on it saying, "its a card for you" when you meet her. We made good use of this practice the other day by helping her improve her writing skills and draw while she enjoyed the same activity.
Here is the picture of the card she made. The glamorous Aunty is Shina Aunty with her two children, one a newborn. They came to our house for a playdate. Behind the card were everyone's names. Everyone got their respective stickers. There were high heel stickers for Aunty,  sunglasses for the boy and princess items for the girls.

handwriting practice

If you haven't broken your neck already trying to read what she has written, here are some pointers on how writing skills can be improved without having to break your neck trying to make them sit and write the same old alphabets:

1) Use writing as more of a fun activity for writing on cards.
2) Make loads of lists. List out the name of the people in your family, the name of her dolls/cars, his/her favourite list of things colours etc.

3) The numbers of your mobile phone.

4) Pretend play of taking orders of your breakfast/lunch/dinner.

5) Writing the body parts and sticking them on a human body chart.

6) Writing the name of his/her school etc.

Speaking of handwriting, I feel it is very important for parents to stress on correct formation of letters right from the beginning so that they dont fall into a habit of writing the letters the wrong way. A same letter can be written in various ways to form the same letter by putting the later strokes first and the starting stroke in the end. This can be a problem in the later years when you get into a habit of writing it the other way round. Hence, it is important to sit with your child while she practices her writing and not leave it on her to finish the work and just see the end product.

Until they get into the keyboard world, you can encourage them to write as much as they can. A blank page of a handwriting book sounds as much boring to me now as much it was when I was my child's age. I was always inspired by my parents' and grandparents' handwritings as a child. I loved watching the beautiful formation of letters when a postcard from my grandparents came home.

Enjoy writing with him/her. Let her see how you write. And let her fall in love with her own handwriting.

Nicknames

My daughters' nicknames are Rhu and Jia. Rhu told me that she had mentioned to her transport lady teacher that her nickname is 'Sol'. I was surprised and asked her why she said her nickname was 'Sol' since her nickname was 'Rhu'. She insisted "No, my nickname is 'Sol'". I again said, "No Rhu, your nickname is Rhu."

Who told you your nickname is 'Sol'? "You", she said. That is when it struck me, I had mentioned once that her nickname meant 'Soul'. Lol

Jia means heart in Hindi. Rhu means soul.

Immediately I took out my sketch pens and drew a heart shape and wrote her little sister's name on it "Jia". Inside the heart, I made another heart shape and wrote "Rhu" on it. She then said, "No, Mummy its all wrong. I am the big one, I will be the big heart, Jia will be the small heart (or soul)".

How would you explain 'soul' to a 4 year old?