Elgarmummy.com

Author: Sarah

  • Obsession With Dinosaurs

    El in his Stegosaurus costume for his book week
    El in his Stegosaurus costume for his book week

    A few months back, El was obsessed with dinosaurs. It started innocently, when I had a little pull out book, and it introduced a few common dinosaurs to him, such as the T-Rex, triceratops  and stegosaurus.

    A parent in his weekend class told me that she had brought her son to the Singapore Science Centre, and he liked the dinosaurs even though he was scared. We brought him there, and I kept imitating the dinosaur sounds and actions to make it less scary for him. He loved the dinosaurs, and the love affair started there.

    I was at a book sale, and I picked up a dinosaur book. We happened to have a dinner with some relatives, so I brought it along to entertain him. Boy, he was totally amazed by the book. I went through the dinosaur names (really tough), and there were colourful pictures, each showing the sizes, and the type of diet they had. A young girl was sitting beside me, so I also showed her the book and she liked it as well.

    From then on, he started learning the names, the pronunciation, and he went on youtube to search for dinosaur abc. He has this inexplicable urge to learn everything in alphabetical order. Perhaps it was the Zoophonics that started this craze.

    He must have watched the video a hundred times.

    Then came along book week in his preschool, with only 1 week notice! How on earth was I going to rent a dinosaur costume that he was willing to wear? There was no time to order anything online. In the end, I decided to make one.

    My friends gave me ideas on how to make it work. So I got a jacket and his school cap, used velcro on foam triangular cutouts, and stuck on them to form the spines of a stegosaurus. I think his teachers loved it, and he liked it too.

    A few months later, his father brought him to an exhibition at Plaza Singapura. I did not go, and so I asked him about the dinosaurs.

    Me: what 4 dinosaurs did you see today?
    El: andesaurus, pterosaur, and… And i-don’t-know-saurus.

     

  • Mao, Meow and Cat

    Despite being an English teacher, I speak Mandarin to my children. I want them to grow up in a bilingual environment, and if possible, multilingual. Even though I am clearly more at ease speaking English, I am better at Mandarin than my husband, so I am the one who speaks that to my children.

    El is more fluent in English, but I still soldier on. Thank goodness my colleague who sits beside me is from China, so we speak to each other in Mandarin, and I slowly become more comfortable. Anyway, more people think I am a Chinese language teacher instead of an English teacher. Yes, and that includes my husband when he saw me for the first time.

    El is quite advanced in reading English. His pediatrician said that he has asynchronous development, as he started spelling words instead of saying them. He was saying ‘b-u-s’ and ‘c-a-t’ before he could say the actual words. So I guess I can forget about spelling words to my husband if we want to speak secretly.

    One day, my mother-in-law told me he was reading his Chinese notes on the rhymes for Term 3. I was very shocked as he had showed no interest in the Chinese flash cards I had shown him. How did he manage to learn the Chinese characters? Perhaps he might have memorised the poems.

    However, I discovered that he was actually reading the hanyu pinyin. I was flipping through a book in Chinese language about animals. He was reading the names of these animals in Mandarin aloud. I thought he had learnt all the animals, but I finally realised that he was reading the hanyu pinyin aloud when he mispronounced ‘goose’ as ‘e’. The ‘e’ sound in Chinese was closer to ‘er’ sound.

    I got him a book on hanyu pinyin, and went through bopomofo with him. It was the Chinese hanyu pinyin alphabet. One day later, he read the whole list to me with almost accurate sounds.

    Just recently, he came home with an Elmo book he got in a goodie bag from one of his classmates celebrating his birthday. I saw he had written some random letters beside some animals, and asked him what he was writing. Earlier he had written the word ‘banana’ beside a drawing of a banana.

    What on earth was he writing, I thought.

    “‘Mao’,” he said in a matter of fact tone.

    Mao for Cat in hanyu pinyin
    Mao for Cat in hanyu pinyin

    I suddenly realised that he had written down the hanyu pinyin of the animals. Some appeared weird because he had spelt them wrongly, such as ‘na’ instead of ‘niao’ for bird.

    I corrected him and he made the changes swiftly.

    I have no idea why he decided to write the hanyu pinyin. It just seemed so natural.

    Once we were done with that page, he asked me to draw a bird on the corresponding page.

    It was only just recently that he had been calling the cat ‘Xiao Hua Meow’ instead of ‘Mao’.

    This boy never ceases to amaze me.

  • It’s A Jungle Out There

    I bought El, my elder son who is turning 3, a book where you can join the dots according to the numbers. It was a cheap book and I got it from a supermarket on my way home one day.

    Bumble Bee collecting pollen
    Bumble Bee

    He was joining some numbers, and asked me what the picture was. I told him that it was a bumblebee. He thought for a while and said, “I think it is a honeybee, not a bumblebee.” Hence I went to google, and golly, he’s right. Honeybees are slender, with uniform black and yellow stripes, and bumblebees are more pudgy and hairier. See this website about honeybee vs bumblebee.

    After that, he traced a creature that had spots, and again he asked me what it was. Maybe it’s a snake. No, it should be a salamander, he said. I didn’t even know how salamanders look like, except that they have four legs. His lines were haphazard so it was hard to tell from the picture whether the reptile had legs. However, there were big spots on the animal. Google showed me a salamander with a black body and yellow spots, just like that drawing.

    Spotted Salamander on Leaf
    Spotted salamader, photo by Tom Tyning.

    Looks like I need to read up more on his favourite topics. I guess I better find out what a newt looks like. It took me some time before I discovered how to tell leopard, cheetah, jaguar, cougar, puma, mountain lion, and panther apart. Jaguars are mainly from central and south America, and they are more muscular compared to leopards. Cougar, puma, mountain lion and mountain cat are the same animal, just that they are known differently in different regions. These words come from Spanish, Portuguese, and Quechua among others.

    Cheetah is the fastest animal. Its body is quite different. Leopards have rosette shaped markings, a ring with black inside, while cheetahs have solid spots. Leopards can be found in Africa and Asia. Panthers? They are either black jaguars or black leopards.

    I’m having a wild guess that Germans really love these animals, to the extent that they name cars, army tanks, and sportswear after these creatures.

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