Gel Time!

Today when I went to the wet market, I popped by the pasar malam to see if I could find anything interesting to buy for Alicia. And anyway, she loves to groove to the very retro music (not CNY songs) that's continuously blasting from this stall selling CNY decor stuff. She gets super hyped up every time we're there and so I brought her there again - she just chose her own sticker album yesterday :D

Anyway, I found this gel thingy which the packaging labelled it as 'Window Gel Art' and I thought it'd be great to introduce her to a new texture and at the same time spend some time exploring clean yet sticky substances. Plus it was an opportunity to teach shapes and colours etc... so why not? One pack was going for $1 so I bought two different designs (there were only two designs anyway). Well, as expected, the gel wasn't top grade so some pieces were actually spoilt because they were torn the moment I removed them from the plastic. But it didn't take Alicia long to find out while playing with the gel that these things were easily torn! And so she went into a tearing frenzy despite my chastising. After awhile she stopped her nonsense but by then, she'd destroyed quite a fair bit. I just see it as a learning experience for her - after all, it's a new texture and a new item. And by the way, she did learn to say "heart" (without a very distinctive /t/ sound) and she even attempted to say "crab" (came out as something like /kwæb/) as there was a crab-shaped gello. :D And we did some grouping activity - or at least tried for awhile.

I only took out the videocam much later to record her playing with the gel. Here's a short clip:

I fed her her lunch as we spent the time by the window - time away from "Elmo's World" :D And look how wet and sweaty she got, just by standing there and shifting gellos!: