The Viking Scout club in Singapore! Hope our boys have many wonderful years of Scouting ahead of them whether here or abroad! Congratulations, Frunty and Pit!
Monday, 11 June 2012
More Scout Camp Photos!
Our first Scout camp Weekend: Pasir Ris, Singapore
Pit woke up this morning and the first words out of his tiny mouth were, "I am a boy Scout now!" Yesterday he told Papa that he would never forget this day for the rest of his life. Frunty and Pit joined the Viking Scout group in Singapore a few months back and we just attended their first overnight camp at Pasir Ris park this past weekend. Papa and I attended the camp to help with supervision especially at night and in the jungle too! About 20 children from several eastern and western countries participated: Singapore, India, Korea, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa! What a special opportunity! We all slept in tents near the beach so star gazing was fun as was roasting marshmallows on the bbq. The first night was exciting as there was an equatorial storm. Taking turns escorting the children to the toilets meant windy, rainy walks in the dark for the parents too! But it made it memorable!
One father spoiled the parents with incredible Singaporean delights and a marvelous bbq on both nights while the kids ate weiners! We brought all gourmet, healthy options for our two boys so they ate well too! Camping in Singapore means always being very close to a supermarket! Very kind parents brought in provisions throughout the weekend and made sure we all had everything we needed! On the last day, we had a big potluck party and then the newcomers like Frunty and Pit participated in a ceremony called an investiture. With the sun shining on the sea and the breezey trees keeping us relatively cool, our boys became official scouts with their new friends! It was a special moment for all of us and indeed, we'll never forget our first Scout camp weekend in Singapore!
One father spoiled the parents with incredible Singaporean delights and a marvelous bbq on both nights while the kids ate weiners! We brought all gourmet, healthy options for our two boys so they ate well too! Camping in Singapore means always being very close to a supermarket! Very kind parents brought in provisions throughout the weekend and made sure we all had everything we needed! On the last day, we had a big potluck party and then the newcomers like Frunty and Pit participated in a ceremony called an investiture. With the sun shining on the sea and the breezey trees keeping us relatively cool, our boys became official scouts with their new friends! It was a special moment for all of us and indeed, we'll never forget our first Scout camp weekend in Singapore!
Tuesday, 5 June 2012
Photos from our EGGSperiments workshop!
Dropping a raw and a cooked egg off the top of ladder...almost the same weight...does one land first? Does gravity pull the heavier one so it matches the speed of the lighter one? How big a splat can you make?
Frunty lights a piece of paper in a bottle. After many broken matches and a few burn marks on the table, we give up on the paper and get the bottle to suck in an egg! Success!
Pit has flat feet so distributed his weight the best. He did not break one single egg!
Frunty demonstrates the eggsperiment and does a great job as a learning leader! Really impressive, Frunts! You did an eggcellent job!EGGSperiments
Frunty spent two days researching eggs and discovering several eggsperiments we could do with our friends from New Zealand: Zoe, Burton and their mom, Louise. We invited them over yesterday to have an eggciting afternoon together before badminton!
It has been challening to get Frunty to write creative assignments at TPS. It was like pulling teeth. Pictures of students at Jurong East Bird Park or on the MRT being robbed did not evoke any creativity. Frunty just got completely frustrated at the word "composition."
But give him a project on eggs...whoa! Hold the reigns! Frunty typed, using ALL fingers, two pages of eggsperiments and information about eggs and presented it well to his friends! He used orange letters and cut and pasted a fried egg at the top of his hand-out. And I did not have to ask him to do it...it was completely self-directed. He asked me how to spell one word, "vinegar" but he had already spelled it correctly.
I am not trying to brag about Frunty or Pit. I am however thrilled that their learning journeys have taken a new course for the better, pun intended. Learning is fun and interesting and does not have to be torture. It is not the filling of a bucket, as Yeats wrote, but the lighting of a fire. We've got forest fires around here and it feels great!
What were Frunty's experiments?
1)) try to break an egg by squeezing it!
2) light candles on a hard boiled egg and watch it get sucked up into a bottle
3) walk on raw eggs without breaking them (eggs' arch shape make them architecturally the strongest form)
4) spinning eggs- one fresh, one old...watch how they spin differently
5) throwing eggs off a ladder- splat! (gravity)
Homework: submerge an egg in vinegar for three days, then let it dry for another two and check out your bouncey egg! It was an eggcellent afternoon of science full of good giggles! With lots more to come!
It has been challening to get Frunty to write creative assignments at TPS. It was like pulling teeth. Pictures of students at Jurong East Bird Park or on the MRT being robbed did not evoke any creativity. Frunty just got completely frustrated at the word "composition."
But give him a project on eggs...whoa! Hold the reigns! Frunty typed, using ALL fingers, two pages of eggsperiments and information about eggs and presented it well to his friends! He used orange letters and cut and pasted a fried egg at the top of his hand-out. And I did not have to ask him to do it...it was completely self-directed. He asked me how to spell one word, "vinegar" but he had already spelled it correctly.
I am not trying to brag about Frunty or Pit. I am however thrilled that their learning journeys have taken a new course for the better, pun intended. Learning is fun and interesting and does not have to be torture. It is not the filling of a bucket, as Yeats wrote, but the lighting of a fire. We've got forest fires around here and it feels great!
What were Frunty's experiments?
1)) try to break an egg by squeezing it!
2) light candles on a hard boiled egg and watch it get sucked up into a bottle
3) walk on raw eggs without breaking them (eggs' arch shape make them architecturally the strongest form)
4) spinning eggs- one fresh, one old...watch how they spin differently
5) throwing eggs off a ladder- splat! (gravity)
Homework: submerge an egg in vinegar for three days, then let it dry for another two and check out your bouncey egg! It was an eggcellent afternoon of science full of good giggles! With lots more to come!
