Ms Z says…

We were on the church shuttle bus, right at the back row, with EZ sitted on my left & right. 

Ms Z looked intensely at my right arm and commented:

“Mummy, your arm is fat!”

I… was… speechless!!! And since we are all sitted right at the back, I’m sure the whole bus can hear this loud girl’s frank opinion of her mummy!!!  How embarressing!!!

That didn’t end.  Ms Z next looked at my domestic helper’s arm too, and commented:

“Aunty E, you are also fat!”

Since little children don’t lie, looks like dieting plan has to start now!  (oops, I nearly finished the whole container of pineapple tarts!)

Keeping books made easy

My children are responsible to keep their own books and toys.  However, after 5 years of accumulating books, there are enough children’s books in the house to make packing and  searching quite a headache even for adults!  If I want the children to help out in the house, I know I have to make it easy for them to do so.

Started a system of keeping my books in the house, which has solved my problems!  Even the children are able to pack the books back at the right place without fail! (99% of the time ) So here we are, neat shelves, maintained by children, with little supervision from adults.

And here’s what I did:

Materials: (All available from major Popular bookshops)

• labels (I use “Sun Flower”, No. 1006)
• Colorful small round stickers (I use Herma No. 1831)
• scotch tape, or the 3M tape that doesn’t spoil the surface
• time  (for my household, I completed it in 1 whole afternoon)

How:

Most Books 

I group most of the children books according to different categories.  And use the labels to color coded each of the category. Eg, the yellow coded books:

The following for your reference, you can change according to your household needs. (We have already given away most of our baby books, so no baby category here.)

• Blue - Toddler Books (simple 1 sentence per page story books)
• Yellow – Preschooler Books (simple 2 – 4 sentences per page books)
• Green – Books with common authors/theme/characters (eg, Eric Carle, Suess, Thomas books, The Berenstain Bears, etc)
• Red – B4FIAR & FIAR books
• Red & Green – Fables, Fairy Tales, Classic Stories, etc
• Red & Blue - Chapter books
• Pink – General Knowledge, Non-fiction
• Brown – Various Authors

These books are than placed accordingly on the bookshelves.

Other books

Series & books in basket

• Series books – I place the books that come in a whole series together without any labelling cause they are quite obvious. (Eg, Sunshine books, National Geographic’s Windows on Literacy Series, etc)
• Chinese books are together
• Books that the children seldom read and I’m still deciding whether to code or not are all in a basket.
• Bibles – they are thick and heavy, and has been used as dividers

And Mr E loves to call it “Our home library”