Category Archives: animals

Lessons from Tap the Frog

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I have a confession to make, I am a real Tap the frog fan. I never started off that way cos it was Wun how first got into it and got Q hooked on it. Evan, who is far from playing with the iPad, is also an avid spectator. Because Q kept getting me to play along with him, I also got into it.

The gameplay is simple enough, you  and your frog are faced with a series of simple time sensitive tasks: it could be as simple as getting your frog to jump five times up and down to something more complex like getting your frog to slide down a snow hill. Some tasks are beyond Q at this point; there are math based questions that he can’t answer knowingly. Though, its hilarious that he has the highscore on one such task purely by accident and clicking randomly. Or maybe I have a math genus… nah…

So, generally speaking, the game is simple enough for my 2.5yo to play; even if he doesn’t always gets maximum points. In fact, he almost never and has to play many many rounds to accumulate the in game coins. You get a coin for each star you earn and over the many times you play, the coins add up.

Q discovered the other day that there was an in game store where you can change the color of your frog, give it clothes and a background. And each add on costs frog bucks (the coins you accumulate) they take out of your bank. And while you have the cheater bug option of buying more frog bucks, we think its an utter waste of money, so we make Q earn his frog bucks the old fashion way. Mind you, since we each have the game on our iPad, we each keep our own frog bank.

Over the course of two weeks (seeing as he only gets to play tap the frog for about 5-10 minutes in the evening) our littler fella has earned enough points to dress his frog. Unsurprisingly, he kinda went a little crazy at the store and bought many things for his now police siren toting, cowboy hat wearing, farm living purple frog.

He discovered soon enough that he ran out of money and lamented when I told him he had to earn more frog bucks to redesign his frog and in his 2.5yo wisdom, he lamented: Earning frog money is so hard! It takes so long!

Such is life my son, such is life.

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Digging for Dinosaurs

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We took the kids to Universal Studio Singapore for my birthday and one of the highlights of the trip there was taking Q to the Lost World where dinosaurs roamed.

Sidebar: Wun and I enjoyed some adult time with harrowing jurassic park ride where we miraculously got away dry while our fellow ride goers ended up utterly and completely wet.  It was kinda like taking a trip into Stephen Spielberg’s iconic movie franchise Jurassic Park. We only wished we knew more dinosaur names.

Anyway, we took Q on the Dino-soaring ride (again after dying from heat in the long queue) and he utterly loved the ride. We missed out on meeting Diane the animatronic dinosaur so we decided we’d have our own little dinosaur adventure right at home.

I found us a dinosaur excavation kit, complete with a little excavation chisel and brush. The whole kit cost me about S$12 and we settled to a happy afternoon of chipping (very slowly) at the block of earth hoping to unearth the first of six promised dinosaurs. After an hour (read: eternity to a kid), we finally saw the tip of what would be later revealed to be the top of a T-Rex’s head.

We did the whole process properly for about two dinosaurs before Q figured out that by smacking the block on the floor hard, more earth would fall out. So that’s what he did and lo and behold, less than fifteen minutes later- and mummy having given up trying to convince him that we had to unearth the dinosaurs slowly; the rest of our dinosaur brood emerged.

As we were washing the earth off the dinosaur figurines, I explained that paleontologists and other excavation crew would spend months and years digging up dinosaur bones and then, like a really difficult jigsaw, piece them together. And my little Q in this 2,5year old wisdom said: They should just bang on the ground, then they would find the dinosaurs before they died and became bones.

Ah. The wisdom of babes.

Alphabet Paper Crafts

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Now that we have finished our ABC learning crafts, I went round digging for stuff we could do ABC wise to revise. I came across this wonderful collection of Alphabet paper crafts at Digitprop.com and thought I’d share with all of you. Its lovely ain’t it? And its just a mouse click and print away!

Review: Esplanade’s Play Time’s The Magic Ocean

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I decided it was time to initiate Evan into the world of theatre and musicals and since I was planning to take Q to watch the well review The Magic Ocean at the Esplanade, I decided I would buy a family set of tickets and take the bub.

This was part of the Esplanade Play Time offerings.

I didn’t have high hopes for the little fella but Q was duly excited to enter a world where you could swim with the whales, make friends with crabs and dance along with the fish. Ever since he watched Finding Nemo, he’s always held a particular fondness for ocean things.

One of the things I like about this is that the audience is seated within the musical space. Meaning, the action happens all around everyone and there are many interactive portions where the audience can take part: action songs, going up to pat the faux jellyfish, shooing the bad “whale catchers away” and sticking shells and starfish (velcro toys that were lying around) onto various ocean creatures (think barnacles).

I was kinda surprised that Evan stayed awake and attentive throughout the whole show and passed out gloriously for two hours after the show (yay!). Q jabbered about the jellyfishes incessantly and tried to mimic Dory (from Finding Nemo) in speaking whale to great hilarity.

This show comes around seasonally and if it comes, you guys would definitely go watch it!

From the program website:

Come on an underwater adventure this June down below the Magic Ocean!

Swim with fish great and small, or take a walk sideways with the friendly crab and starfish! Hide in a large clam shell, or peacefully glide through the sea with turtles and ride the rolling waves up and down. Once in a while, you might have to flee from the fearsome shark!

In this theatrical experience specially designed for 2 –4 year olds, children will discover a magical world through visual stimulation, music, shadow play and interaction as the ocean comes alive before their eyes.

Come sit along the seabed among colourfuls coral and watch the wonders of the sea unfold with us in the Magic Ocean!

Cupcake foil animal menagerie

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Q loves animals and he often asks to make animal menageries with random stuff we find in the house.

Since we’ve been doing a fair amount of cooking and baking we’ve dug deep into our kitchen stash and emerged with a pile of cupcake tin foils. I no longer bake with these so we decided to repurpose them to make “stuff with”.

So, we pulled out our paint supplies and set out to make some animals. We found a discarded egg tray and used bits of that to make animal parts (noses, beaks, heads…) and here’s what we came up with!

The foil animals aren’t the most sturdy and they bend and dent a fair bit so we made up stories about them as we went along. Sometimes they got into fights, sometimes they fought wars, sometimes they were careless and fell down. Either ways, it was fun!