Sam’s Science is a series of  four books on science topics for little kids.  They are written in story form using very simple language and very simple explanation that even little kids can understand.  Sam, the main character in the book, learns about various science topics through his conversations with his mother.  #2 and #3 enjoy the books, especially #3 who loves to read.

There are four books in the series :

I bought these books at one of those ad hoc book sales that take place at open spaces in malls.  If you cannot find them at one of those sales, they are available at The Book Depository (free worldwide shipping).

Remember, it is still free shipping.  This is the part I really like about Book Depository.  If I think of one book that I like, I can order it and don’t have to try to think of other books to buy in order to accumulate my order to sufficient level.  :)

It is terrible to think of cooking when you have no appetite to eat.  That was why for all my pregnancies, I declared kitchen closure for the first trimester until I got my tastebuds back.  Back then it was easier to close my kitchen because I didn’t have three kids to feed.  Now, I have three boys and one of them is a pre-teen with a yo-yo appetite that could be normal one day and demanding for 3 servings on another day.  I can’t just declare kitchen closure.  Even though I have no appetite to eat, the kids and the man have to.  It is actually easier for me if THEY have no appetite to eat because it means I don’t have to cook!  But then I would be worried sick about them if that is the case.

I didn’t realise just how useful it is to have ‘reserves’ until the ‘reserves’ have to be drawn upon during this period of sickness.  Over the last one week, a combination of the following helped settle the meals :

Stash of Frozen Stock

Only in this case, it was stock that I made meant for freezing, just before I became really sick.  On the day it was done, my hubby made macaroni soup for everyone (with instructions from me on how to do it).  We had it again for lunch the next day.  For another dinner, part of the stock was used to make a big pot of chicken porridge.  The younger boys had leftovers the next day.

I still have stock stash in the freezer, so we can whip up a quick and simple meal any time.

Frozen Meals

Frozen Shepherd’s Pie I made some time ago, and frozen leftover minestrone soup settled another dinner for us.  I still have frozen meals enough to at least feed the boys three meals.  Adults can simply make do.  The one sick couldn’t be bothered to eat anyway.

Easy Meals

Plain porridge is easy to cook.  We fried up some eggs and SPAM to go with it. It is not the most nutritious meal but it would have to do.  On days that I didn’t feel so sick, I cooked up simple dish-and-rice meals.  Dishes had to be quick and simple to do, like teriyaki chicken.  Nothing that requires a lot of cutting, preparing and multiple-steps cooking.  I remember one of the days last week, when I was down, the kids demanded hubby for simply fried eggs with plain rice, drizzle with a bit of soy sauce.  This is certainly something he can handle and he gladly did it for the kids.  Now, if I were him, I would have cut up some tomatoes and cucumbers to complete the meal.  Then again…….. Anyway, that brings me to another point : cucumbers and tomatoes can make up for the loss in veggie dishes.  Lettuce too.  No cooking required.  Somehow, through divine intervention I guess, we bought quite a bit of fruits just before this bug hit me.  So at least we have fruits.

Tonight, I am just going to toss some cooked rice in pasta sauce that I made some time ago, sprinkle cheese on top and make baked rice.  Add chorizo (easy to cut and prepare) and frozen peas and corn to it as well.  I am sick but I can still manage this.

Take Outs

We had take-outs too.  At least we didn’t have to eat take-outs every single meal.  I would have permanently lost my appetite if I had to eat take-outs every day.

So this is how we have been “subsisting” while I am recuperating from the nasty bug.  I am still recovering.  When I am well again, I will definitely build up my stash of reserves again.

Today, with the prevalence of tablets and iPads, and even schools are using these things in teaching, if you asked me whether I would sell multimedia learning tools now, my answer will still be ‘No’.  This is especially so if the tools are targeted at little children.  The younger the kids, the louder my ‘No’ will be.  Do my children use multimedia learning tool?  Not really. We do own an iPad and once in a long while, they get to play with it.  We downloaded some learning apps since they were free and we just wanted to try them out.  But honestly, the kids hardly get to touch them.  The two older ones in school do have multimedia learning experience because the school requires them to do certain amount of school work online.  Other than that, we do not buy educational CD-ROMs or DVDs for them.  The one thing that could qualify as “multimedia” that we actively encourage and support is audiobooks.  We downloaded lots of free audiobooks for the boys and loaded them into a Nano dedicated for this purpose so that they can listen to them as and when they like.  Kind of like how other kids can watch the TV as and when they like.  The other thing that falls into this ‘multimedia’ category would probably be online learning videos that I sometimes let my eldest son watch.

By now, you would have realised that in our world now, multimedia is everywhere and the line between “multimedia” and the conventional is now very blur.  The internet, for instance, is almost like the air we breathe.  Who can survive without it now?  My eldest certainly relies on the internet for research and school work at times.  So it would not be true to say that their lives are ‘clean’ of multimedia influence.  But we do try to minimise, especially when they were younger.

Why are we so careful about this?  Well, first of all, we feel that having too much screen time affects their social behaviour.  Hence, from the start, we banned all handheld games.  If they are out with us, we do not want them to have their faces glued to some PSP or gameboy device, oblivious to the world around them.  It is better if they develop social skills in learning to play and interact with children or adults around them, and also learn basic manners.  They learn to sit down for a meal and wait for everyone to finish before moving off instead of whining about ‘when can we leave?’ and they learn to talk and listen instead of ‘disappearing’ into the virtual world.

My partner in business and I felt strongly about the effect of multimedia tools on learning, brain development and behaviour.  We both disliked what handheld gaming device do to children.  We both felt that things like CD-ROM learning was inferior to multi-sensory learning that actually uses the 5 senses.  I recently read an article where a dad said that his very young son at least learned ‘hand-eye co-ordination’ using some electronic games.  That is not the kind of hand-eye co-ordination we want to spend all the hours developing.  Try tossing a ball back and forth for some real hand-eye co-ordination, or pushing a lace through some beads.

There are many researches now that show the negative effects of too much screen time on developing brains.  Do you know that if a child reads a story, the brain develops in such a way that is way more complex than if the child were to watch a cartoon of the same story?  We are not talking so much about learning facts but how to develop the brain so that the child will eventually be able to tackle higher-order thinking.  A child who spends his days in front of the television may be able to regurgitate facts about the different species of sharks or how global warming affects the environment, but he will have problem tackling higher-order, problem-solving issues later on.  In fact, the American Association of Paediatrics (AAP) recommends that children below the age of 2 be given zero screen time.  This means zero television time.  Yet, most parents will be hard pressed to entertain their below-2s if Playhouse Disney is taken away.

When we sold things to parents, we found that one of the reasons why things like CD-ROM “educational games” were so popular compared to manipulatives or books was because for books and manipulatives, parents have to actually be there to use the manipulatives or read the books to their kids.  For CD-ROMs, they can just load the games and leave their kids to “self-learn” or “self-entertain” while they go off to be busy with their own things.

What they do not realise is that all these television programmes or games, with their loud sounds, bright colours and special effects, are over-stimulating their kids.  Of course the kids would be entertained, engrossed, and they would love the games!  However, these stimulation are affecting how their kids’ brains develop.  There are even evidence to suggest that there may be a correlation between too much media screen time and behavioural issues like ADHD.

Now, it does not take a rocket scientist or scientific research to tell this mama something that is completely common sense : If a child is exposed to lots of sounds, colours, sights, change of scenes, etc – basically what you find on a screen – and the child gets accustomed to being ‘entertained’ this way.  One day, you take these screens away and put a book in front of the kid.  Do you think the kid will find the book interesting? (Pause to think.)

A child, from the moment he is able, is given lots of TV entertainment, iPad games, iPhone games, and when he is slightly older, PSPs, gameboys, Wii, etc.  By the time he goes to primary school, he is expected to sit at his desk for hours, listen to his teachers teach using mostly some kind of overhead projector, books and the white board.  He comes home and has to do his homework and revision using his textbooks, workbooks and exercise books.  All these things do not make loud dramatic sounds, bright interesting colours and figures that moves.  Is there any wonder that the child will get listless in class and start acting up or dislike schoolwork?

I once met someone in the education line who, when asked by a parent what she could do with her school-going son whom she thought had ‘short attention span’, asked the parent whether her son had any problem playing hours of computer games in one go?  The answer was ‘no’.  The boy was too used to having stimulation that books and school could not hold his attention anymore.

But doesn’t all these ‘multimedia learning tools’ help the child to learn more easily?  Isn’t it a good thing that they hold the interest of the kid?  Well, I do think that to some extent, they do teach the child something.  However, the harm far outweighs the benefits.  It is like feeding your child junk food every day.  Yes, the child will love you for it.  He loves the food and the food keeps him full and not let him go hungry.  The food may even have certain level of nutrition in them.  But all these short term ‘benefits’ is nothing compared to the long term harm they cause.  Even those touted to be ‘educational’ may have less benefits than what parents are led to believe.  Imagine my surprise when I read about researches that show that watching Sesame Street did nothing to the academic results of underprivileged kids in the US.

(Update 13 April 2012 : I just read an article a couple of days ago about using tablet PC in education.  Apparently, 5 years ago, some children from a certain country were given tablet PCs to be used in school for learning.  5 years later, they tested the children and found that there is no improvement in academic performance for these kids at all.  The only thing they learned was computer skills, which they otherwise would not have learned because of the general lack of IT and internet access in that place.)

Ok, you may think that I am too ‘old-fashion’ and the world has progressed and eventually, learning will be done by the way of multimedia tools.  Well, I agree.  Looking at the trend now, even brain experts believe that going forward, human brain evolution may change to adapt to such development.  Now, whether this is a good thing, we do not know.  There are evidence enough to show that doing things develops the brain better than watching things.  Does this mean that future generations of humans will be less intelligent?

For now, my opinion is that to bring up a great learner, you really do not need to have all these multimedia tools.  You don’t have to totally get rid of them.  But put a limit on them, especially when your kids are at the preschool age.  Read books, play toys (but not too much of them; and there are good toys and bad toys….which I will not get into now), go out and play in the nature, have lots of physical activities.  All these will bring up a healthier child both physically and mentally.  If a child is taught to think  (“Why do you think this happens?”), and taught how to find out answers (“Let’s go and read a book to find out!” or “Let’s do this experiment to find out.” ), I think the child will be set on the path to be a greater learner than a child who is exposed to only games and TV.

Further Reading :

Understsanding TV’s Effect on the Developing Brain

Babies and Toddlers should Learn from Play, Not Screen

Are We Over-Stimulating Young Children

Baby Einstein : Not So Smart After All

Endangered Minds : Why Children Don’t Think and What We Can Do About it, Jane Healy

Debby describes these women as expressing feelings of sadness, confusion, and often anger. “The effects are more far-reaching than most of us realise. The emotions can spill over into how women parent, how they relate with their partners, and even how they feel about themselves.”

Yes, the effect is far-reaching.  In fact, there are studies to show that the aftermath of a bad birth experience is akin to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  After all these years, whenever I think of the first birth, I still feel angry (at myself), confused, incredible sadness, even grief, and regret.  The big “WHY?” question always pops up.  Even though I know technically why it happened that way, this is more of a philosophical ‘why’, as in ‘why did this happen to me?’ that victims of tragedies would ask.  I am not really angry with the obgyn.  I know he was doing his best with the best intention.  The overall care that I received from him over the years shows me that he is a good doctor, a good person.  I am more angry with myself, I guess, for allowing all these things to happen.  I am angry with the “system” as it was, for denying me the knowledge that I could have options.  Actually, I cannot even blame the ‘system’ because I know that all the information was out there if I wanted to seek it out.  But I didn’t.  Like most women, I took things for granted. I was naive and in a way, I was also “bo chap” (coundn’t care less attitude).   After all, how complicated can birth be?  You suffer a few hours of pain, and out pops the baby, right?  The doctor is just there to do whatever he has to do to make sure that things don’t go downhill, right?  How wrong I was!

You may think : what’s the big deal?  It’s been more than 10 years.  Get a grip already and stop harping on it!

But that’s precisely my point.  You will feel better with time, especially if there are good birth experience subsequently, or if there has been some form of therapy to help deal with those feelings.  But you never really get over it.  That’s why whenever I see new-moms-to-be, I want to grab them by their shoulders, look them in the eyes and urge them to think about the birth experience they want and not “go with the flow” or take things for granted because whatever happens will remain with them forever.

Despite what happened, I was blessed because I did not end up with a C-section after 2 days of labour.  Many others, even among my own friends, are not as fortunate.

So if you are pregnant for the first time, think about the kind of birth you want and actively prepare yourself for it.  To quote from the article, ‘Unfortunately the question is not, “Are you going to go with the flow?” In our current birthing climate, the real question is, “Just whose flow are you going with?”‘