Trial @ GUG- GIfted Babes

Baby Reagan 's trial class for the Gifted Babes bilingual programme at Growing Up Gifted school. I knew that they have a segment on zoo phonics as well, and so I was quite confident that Reagan will enjoy it. We arrived half an hour early and so the teacher opened up a playroom for us to wait inside.

 Once again, baby Reagan was mistaken as a baby girl by the teachers there, haha!

There were two teachers in class, one spoke in mandarin and the other one in English. Since it is a bilingual programme, both teachers work together in such a way that one will instruct in English, the other one will translate in Mandarin and vice versa.

 The lesson began with free play as usual, recite a couple of poems, rhymes, Introduce letter "X", bringing out a fox puppet and painting a picture of a fox with bare hands. During snack time, the school doesn't provide the snacks and parents are supposed to bring their own. Next, the teacher read them a story book about bears-hunting. The book was quite small and by this time, most of the babies were quite distracted and tried to move away from the mat. After the story ended, they took out some props like fake grass patch and brown pillows, and the babies were to walk/crawl over them and pretend they are in the forest hunting for bears. I think this segment was quite interesting as effort was made to link the previous story to the sensory play. Reagan enjoyed the part when I held him to walk over the grass patch with his bare feet. He kept looking down at his own feet and then looked up at me with that satisfied smile on his face. Lastly, the teacher surprised the babies by bringing a lifesize bear into the classroom and announced that they have found the bear!

Next, the teacher continued to introduce items that made the phonics "X" sound , like "boX" and "foX." And after that, she began the zoophonics recitation, the segment I've been waiting for! Like a proud mama, I knew that baby Reagan's attention span during the phonics segment is going to impress everyone. Baby Reagan sat very attentively throughout the entire alphabets and even waved his hands along with it. It was enough to surprise the teachers and some parents there as it was rather an unexpected response from a 1 year old baby who came for the first trial. Of course I then explained that baby Reagan has been exposed to alphabets at a young age at home and also in the previous classes he attended, and so now he enjoys any activities related to phonics or alphabets.

Lastly, we moved over to the music room to sing and dance a few nursery songs with the teacher playing the keyboard, before we ended the class with the goodbye song.

Overall the entire lesson structure is quite similar to Bibinogs, although different animals are used for the zoophonics, and the space at GUG is much bigger. If to compare the teachers, Bibinogs' ones are louder and more engaging, which made the class more lively.