Counting and subtraction

Dearest Jay has been quietly learning his maths. He is already quite good in counting. Sometimes he can even cou t with one glance. Say, 5 apples on the table. He does not need to touch and count the apples one by one. At one glance, he would tell you there are five apples on the table. Recently, he advanced to simple subtraction. Eg. Yesterday he saw that granny had 5 apples in the fridge. Today, as he opened the fridge, he exclaimed "why there are only 2 apples left? Where are the other 3?" wow, mom in law was really impressed.

We tried testing him with subtration with our fingers.... How may fingers do I have... And how many fingers do I have now? He could almost get it right... Its a start to more complicated maths of addition and subtraction. (he is only 3 years old). Now I have to find ways to help him build up this skill... Inserting addition and subtraction into his curriculum at home.

 I am in the process of reorganizing my afterschooling plans and the kids curriculum. - thanks to my corrupted hard disk. Hopefully I'll get them done the soonest. In the meantime, I am concentrating on creativity with Jay. He plays with his building blocks everyday, and daddy did some rocket crafts with him.

 Joy is concentrating on her penmanship. She has to write at least 1 page from the exercise book everyday. I've discovered that she only wants to write when it's just a stroke (for beginner in chinese characters) but when she is required to write the alphabets ( more than 1 stroke) or even a whole English word, she would fidget. Once she even cried out loud "so many" (hao duo a!) ;) I can't decide wheather to smile or to be angry with her at this point.- but she still have to do her writing practice everyday.

I have decided not to let her practice writing using the marker pens on laminated paper anymore. She has proven that she could write - with the markers ( it does not require much effort from her) but she has problems with pencil. She has yet to learn to adhere to the columms in the exercise book and use more strength in writing. - writing with markers does not need much wrist strength.