Mindchamps Childminding Service at Paragon {Giveaway}

Ever had an hour, maybe two to kill in town with your child in tow and not know what to do? You might like to consider MindChamps Child Minding Service at Paragon.

I didn't know that MindChamps offered such a service until we were recently invited to try it out. Essentially the Child Minding Service offers parents the attractive proposition of having their child meaningfully engaged and learning under the care of MindChamps' early education experts while parents tend to other matters. 

Immediately I could think of a few instances when such a service would come in handy:

1. When you need to run some errands around town and just need someone else to watch your child for a while so that you can get your errands run more quickly and conveniently; 

2. When you are in between appointments with your child and would like to occupy him/her meaningfully; or

3. When you are waiting for one child to finish his/her classes in the area and would like to occupy your other child with something productive in the meantime.

Available every weekend between 11am and 5pm for children aged between 2 and 7, the MindChamps Child Minding Service goes beyond mere babysitting and instead, seeks to help your child develop his/her literacy, creativity and physical coordination, and in the process build the vital neural networks essential for cognitive development. This is achieved through three different sessions of 30 minutes each: 

(Credit: MindChamps website)

I brought Noey and Meips along to try this out a couple of Saturdays ago, leaving DD some valuable time to do his own thing. (DD was chuffed, naturally.) 

We started the Narrative Intelligence session with the telling of a story which is very familiar to both my kids: The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Despite knowing this story forwards and backwards, they stayed interested, and were particularly delighted when the teacher brought out cut-outs of the different food after the story for them to play with and put in order. This they did with a simple counting activity emphasising number and sequence.

Listening to The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Meips inching closer to get a prime spot.

Cut-outs of the food to place in order. My kids get very excited.

How many of each kind of food are there?

The children then more on to do a simple craft activity to make a collage of a butterfly. Every child is given an outline of a butterfly on paper and containers of coloured paper to use. The teacher took care to cater to the different age-groups by giving older children like Noey smaller pieces of coloured paper, and younger children like Meips bigger pieces. The kids really got into this, especially Noey! And I think he did a really great job with his.

Picking the colours they wanted, and their containers, for their butterfly collage.

Hard at work sticking.

Noey concentrating on his piece, which is filling out nicely.

All done!

We move on to the Junior Chef session after everyone took a break to wash their hands. Tying in with the story earlier, the kids learn that they are going to make a Caterpillar Sandwich. What this really is is a kaya sandwich with grapes forming the caterpillar on the bread. The kids had quite a bit of fun with this one, doing everything on their own, from spreading the kaya to laying out the grapes to position the caterpillar in any shape they chose. And of course, eating it all up at the end was the real treat.

Teacher demonstrating how to spread the kaya.

Very seriously deciding what her caterpillar should look like. Not surprisingly, Meips had a very long caterpillar. She loves grapes!

After eating, everyone troops to the wash their hands again before moving on to the Neuro-Mooves Gym session. Meips had previously checked out the Neuro-Mooves Gym room on an earlier visit to MindChamps so she was really excited when the door opened. Using the flexible soft equipment, the teacher helped set up a simple obstacle course for the kids and they all had a great time just going for it. This was definitely their favourite.

Here we are at the NeuroMooves Gym!

Jump!

Scambling through underneath.

Making it through the rather long tube.

Slide! Initially Meips needed assistance to climb up and slide down but you could see her doing more and more herself as her confidence grew.

It was a fun one-and-a-half hour session for the two kids and time literally flew by. In fact, the kids didn't want to leave the gym after their time was up and only did so reluctantly. Overall I thought it was a simple yet good programme to engage kids in a safe and productive manner. For $9 per 30-minute session, I though it was really rather reasonable. Definitely something to keep in mind for the times when I need to occupy the kids an hour of so!

And to let you try it out for yourself, here's a GIVEAWAY!

I have 5 SETS of 2 vouchers (worth $36) for MindChamps Child Minding Service. Each voucher entitles to you to a complimentary 60-minute session at MindChamps at Paragon. To participate, simply follow the directions below. This is the first time I'm using Rafflecopter to manage a giveaway!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Contest ends at midnight, Saturday 31 August 2013 and is valid for Singapore residents only.

MindChamps Child Minding Service is available every weekend from 11am to 5pm for children between 2 to 7 years of age at the MindChamps Pre-school at Paragon, Level 6. Each 30-minute session is $9 and you choose a minimum of two sessions for a one-hour slot. Do note that for children between 2-3 years of age, an accompanying adult is required.

 *This post is sponsored by Rise and Shine, in conjunction with MindChamps. We were also offered a complimentary session to try out the MindChamps Child Minding Service for the purposes of writing this post.