Honey4Boyz

Posting by Xian Jin During the weekend, we went to Universiti Malaya, the alma mater of my parents. When I first saw this place, I felt a sense of excitement. It was a huge place with many different faculties, fields, stadiums, courts and other things. But we're there for the Taman Rimba Ilmu, a rainforest garden rather than a flower garden. My brother and I posing in front of the Universiti Malaya's logo. We were early as the traffic was extraordinarily clear and were the first participants to arrive. There was a stadium at the opposite of Rimba Ilmu so we had some fun there.   An ice-breaking session and a simple exercise to warm ourselves up.  This garden walk was organized by the Malaysian Nature Society.  Soon, we were ready to move. Before that, we were given bags and tweezers to collect the dried leaves, fruits and twigs on the ground. Our guide showed us a short tree named dinosaur palm. It has sharp leaves as a form of protection. ...

Brandon joined the homeschooling group to the National Zoo for the "I am a Zoo Keeper" programme. Becoming a zoo keeper is certainly a labour of love. Zoo keepers are fully responsible for the animals in their sections - they clean, feed, provide enrichment for the animals in their care.  Edwina, who is a zoo keeper and our guide for the day took us by trams to the Mammal Kingdom. She educates zoo visitors about the animals in the zoo.  The children were supposed to do food puzzle for 3 groups of animals, ie porcupine, binturong and the striped hyena. The zoo keepers were supposed to keep these wild animals fit and sensitive to their instincts. Hence, the children would help the zoo keepers to prepare some food for them but the animals would not be spoon fed, rather, they have to do some exercises and use their senses to get to the food. Brandon's group was assigned to do the meat cage with branches and rope. Mummy helped him to tie the knots. We've to mak...

The Silver Jubilee Reunion of Class 1987 of Pudu English Secondary School (PESS), also well-known as the Purple School because in those days, our school uniform was in purple. There were more than 90 of us who attended this Reunion after 25 LONG years - first time for our year of 1987. It was an emotionally-charged experience, bringing back much memories of the 'glory days'.  CLASS 5P1 My Class 5P1.... many of them I've known since Primary One. It's a lot easier to organise such reunion today with social networking sites like Facebook. Even managed to contact some of our teachers and they still looked great! Our 5P1 class teacher, Pn Hasnah was as lively and humorous as before...... We gathered around our teachers, sang our PESS school song, reminding us of our school assembly..... Many of us looked back on our secondary school days with mixed feelings of pride and embarrassment. We couldn't believe we wore those clothes, go...

A host of meaningful events was held in the old Chinatown on the Independence Day to bid farewell to some of the well-loved, heritage sites around the Petaling Street area. See old Kuala Lumpur before the heritage sites disappear to make way for the MRT development.  Victor Chin and artist Long Thien Shih organised the Urban Sketch along Jalan Sultan on Merdeka day. My boys joined in the fun of this meaningful event. Hive of activities in Petaling Street with people from all walks of life who came for the heritage walks, cycling tour, films, open houses, etc. Boys warming up with the other artists, photographers and enthusiasts in the Urban Sketch. Quite shy to sketch in the open and attracted many passers-by to stare at their work..... What's this? A TV crew!!! Errr, what to say ah??? Tips from the real artist!! Young and old sketchers... including Liyin, our talented artist friend, who's so kind to invite us to jo...

When things didn't turn out like we expected...... We've a week school-term break that overlapped with Hari Raya celebration. We thought of going to Malacca for an overnight camp - quite last minute, without any booking. We got stuck in a horrible jam, instead of wasting time on the road, we turned back home. We thought of catching a movie - but we couldn't find any that's worth watching. Then, we decided to go ahead with our plan to camp, but at home instead.  BBQ fun at home with our roasted potatoes and burgers. Everyone chipped in to help and soon we had a fire going. Our own makeshift rubbish dump! A first class air-conditioned camp at home and the children slept soundly until the next morning! We thought of setting the tent outside but it rained heavily after dinner and the children backed out. The next day, we tried again to go to Malacca, at least for a day trip. Traffic was better, but still a lot of cars.  We arrived quite late and ...

I've started to homeschool my 6-year-old boy since June. It's a short term arrangement until he goes to Primary 1 next year. Homeschooling is not a new idea in our family. But I only got the courage to do it recently. One of the great books that encouraged me deeply was - "Homepreschool and Beyond" by Susan Lemons. Susan is very real, else we think she is a supermom. She has her fair share of successes and struggles - to be full-time as a homeschool mom and part time as a writer and blogger. Whilst social media was a great tool for marketing her book, it also took too much of her time. Just when Susan was making her presence felt in the social media, she put her brakes on, because she had wanted to make the main thing the main thing. There's no supermom, when we say "yes" to one thing, we are always saying "no" to something else.  Most people believe that the basic building blocks of education for all children are reading, writing and arith...