Left brain, right brain

Last week I was at the Big Bookshop, browsing after lunch. I wanted to buy Cait some activity books since she is into cutting. She likes to make her own 'books', cut out hearts etc from scrap paper when she is not doodling away. But lately, she's been coming to me saying that she's bored. And I have to confess, my attention has been on my work, on Owain, on Trin, and the older kids and Cait has slipped under the radar.

So I wanted to buy her a book that we could work with together. Browsing there, I found some very interesting 'activity' books. Good paper quality, nice illustrations, all in colour! The books catered to different age groups eg 4 - 5, 5 - 6, 6 - 7 and so on. And the 'activities' in there were geared towards stimulating either the right brain or the left brain. There were two volumes in each age group - one for left and the other for right brain development.

I thought the concept was so interesting! Why did I never discover these before? Among some of the exercises were patterning, memory work, logic etc. For example, the child would be given 30sec to look at a picture eg a beach scene. After 30sec, she had to flip the page and circle out items from a similar picture that were not in the original scene.

The books were a refreshing change from the usual Singaporean versions which catered to Nursery, K1, K2 etc, focused on maths, english, chinese etc.

Only drawback - everything was in Mandarin! Yes, the books came from Beijing!

My good friend who was with me at the time reassured me that it was so simple even I could read - hee! So I bought one home to try it out. I also bought another full-colour cut-n-paste activity book - loved the colour, the thick paper and the cute illustrations. And yes, it was also all in Chinese!

Cait loved both books. She loved the colour, the illustrations and loved doing the exercises in the right brain book. It takes me a while to frown over the Mandarin descriptors and instructions and then to translate it to Cait but apart from that, its all systems go.

Cait got hooked and bugged me to 'do' 14 pages straight with her in one afternoon! While she sailed through most of the stuff in there, she had some difficulty with the concept of perspectives. Eg they show a tabletop of fruit. Next picture shows four children standing around each side of the table. Cait had to circle the child whose perspective of vision matched the earlier picture. She also found the bit on reflections tricky (so did I! I found it difficult to explain to her about mirror reflections being the opposite of the actual and I don't know if my explanation left her more confused than enlightened.) Some patterning work also got her confused - and it wasn't the usual straightforward ABABABAB kind of pattern. The use of shapes within shapes, circles and lines made it a tad complicated. Even when I looked through the work, I had to stop and look carefully first before deciding if she got it right or wrong.

Definitely not easy.

But she likes it, so looks like I'll be going back to get the left brain version soon. More importantly, I'm glad the chunk of work I was trying to complete is over. Now I'll have more time to just sit with her and do cutting and pasting. And we can play with the large bottles of paint I bought - I have plans to do this with Trinity and Owain too. And if Cait is game for the right/left brain stuff, I'm there too.