My Little Princess

We just came back from the book fair at Suntec City, and both father and daugther are in slumberland now. The book fair itself was not crowded, it was the human traffic down at the ground level. They just set up the Food Republic food court down at the ground level which had took up the space previously available for human traffic going up to the exhibition halls, so it was a real squeeze.

Anyway, my main purpose of going to the book fair was to get the book “Educating the Whole-Hearted Child” from Shalom Christian Media. I enquired about the book last year but they will only bring it in during the fair. At the SCM booth, I also picked up the book “Little Women”. This is part of a series of books called Classics for Young Readers. This book was my favourite when I was young, and I bought this for Sarah hoping that she will enjoy it too in time to come. It was also at a too-good-to-miss price.

Next, we checked out the A Star booth, hoping to look at their Chinese CD-rom learning program. Now, we are definitely not parents who allow our kid to indulge in computer games or programs. On the contrary, I try not to let Sarah get too acquainted with the computer. But desperate times call for desperate measures. It has come to a point where both hubby and I are getting worried about Sarah’s Mandarin. She speaks Mandarin like an ang-moh, and she replies in English when we talk to her in Mandarin. So we were looking around for some Chinese learning program that will kick-start her interest in Chinese. And we liked what we saw at A Star. We bought the Mandarin Starter Set (age 2 to P1) which consists of 10 CD-roms, covering the basics like numbers, colour, weather etc, hanyu pinyin, writing strokes, sentence structure,and some stories. We bargained and they also threw in 6 mini books and 2 audio CDs from the beginner set. So hopefully, this will stir up Sarah’s interest in the language.

While we were walking around the hall, I got pulled by a salesperson to a booth where we were given a sales pitch about the particular company’s reading program which promises to teach your kid to read, as well as moral values, and comes with a set of books and encyclopedia and a free bookcase. It cost around $2.8k. (With that kind of money, I can get 2 to 3 years worth of curriculum packages!!) Of course we politely declined and was prepared to walk off, when the salesperson atopped us and proceeded to find out our reason for not wanting their program. While my hubby was explaining to them, this guy who saw my hubby talking so animatedly came along and tried to hard sell again, telling us that as parents, we have the responsibility to make sure our kids are well-prepared for school and should not just leave them to the teachers, showing us his sales records which showed parents with kids as young as 14 months old buying their program. It was at this point when I got really impatient with him, and I just told him right in the face that I am homeschooling my girl, and that their program and boring encyclopedia and storybooks will not suit us at all. With that they finally allowed us to walk away. No matter how good the program is, such hard core selling tactics will definitely not bag me as their customer. I hate such tactics.

We walked around for a while more, and bought 3 felt story boards. They are stories of The Three Little Pigs, Little Riding Hood and the Birth of Jesus. These are like the ones used in Sarah’s sunday school, but smaller version. She loved those, and insist on carrying one around, refused to let us keep in the bag. I would have loved to stay longer, but we were all getting tired, and the shopping bags were getting very heavy, so we left.

It was a good day with good buys. I am happy.