Pray for MH370

It was a gloomy day especially last night.

Be safe, MH370. Please come home. My thoughts and prayers are with the cabin crews and the passengers.

And stop all the speculations guys. It's time for us to come together, even our neighbors understand that needs.

From digital flashcard to book: How I teach my toddler Hijaiyah

Yesterday marks one of the happiest day in my life.

Considering I was a working mother doing my PhD part time at the beginning of Khaira's life, I didn't have much time to spend with Khaira to teach her Hijaiyah everyday.

5 minutes every day (I try my best to make it a daily thingy but to be honest max is only 4 times a week), that's all I could afford at that time.

I started when she was 1 y.o. But I discovered bringing the flashcards everywhere was a chaos. She started biting them, spoiling food over them, I know I should just let it be, but urmm.. OCD much?

So I decided to be creative.. I downloaded this apps..

Alif Ba Ta Sign One

Since every time the hijaiyah appears, it produces a sound, I decided to print screen each Hijaiyah and use it somewhat like flashcard to my little girl. Because you bring your phone everywhere, I can do it at my own convenience.

Teaching her aa, ba, ta to ya was an exciting task. She was very obedient and excited everytime I took out my phone. Because the reward is that, she can watch Barney from my phone afterwards. Only that, I found Barqy method works easily for her compared to Furqan. Probably because the set of letters they introduced were closer to her heart.

Began with, "Na, ma, sa, ya". Then, "Ka, ta, ja, wa." 4 letters a week, then I switched.

The challenge came when I was teaching her fatha, qasra and dhamma (tanda atas, baris dan depan). But I figured, persistent is the key. I found doa helps me increase my patient and in the end, I am always at peace every time I teach her. Because they said you absorbed more when you're happy.

In the end, we want them to respect us, not scared of us.

I was in my morning (make it all day) sickness during her fatha, qasra and dhamma stage. I could barely find time to teach her because I was so busy vomiting throughout the night.

I downloaded this app called My First Iqra',

Did a little editing using my Note (I'm so in love with my Note 2, she's 14 months today!), and I taught her whenever I was well. Sometimes by the side of the road while waiting for my sate.

Then, I figured I was done with flashcards, let's give Furqan book a try. My first attempt yesterday made me a proud mother until now..

Alhamdulillah :) Penat lelah felt so worth it!! Who thought 5 minutes every other day and now she's at this stage.

 Lepas ni huruf sambung pula, doakan :)

Kursus right brain from ipn - A review

Last Saturday, Love and I went to Kursus Right Brain from ipn, the speaker was non other than Puan Lina. My verdict..

WORTH EVERY CENT!!

We learned so much in such short period. Sharing with you here, I guess was not as exciting as attending the course yourself. Masya Allah.. so much activities that will just open your eyes like never before :)

Nonetheless, I'm gonna share with you the gist of the talk.

Right brain is important because it enhances your long term memorization, awareness and imagination. Most of the time, our right brain capability decreases from 6 years old and above and as we get older, our right brain tends to go to sleep. This is because our education system is mostly based on left brain. So, we need to stimulate our children's right brain so that they use both sides of brain equally.

What I learned from the talk:

1. Memorization

Puan Lina introduced simple memorization game that I already tried for Khaira.

As of now, we arranged two cards of different colours and we asked Khaira to copy that same combination. It took a while for her to understand the game.

Home made memorization game for Lil K

A few days later, once she understand, you arrange back the two cards of different combination, let her see it for a few seconds. Then, hide the combination and see if she can memorize the same combination and arrange the cards herself.

If she can, you decrease the time for her to look at the card before you hide it and put more combinations.

Simple as that. Very practical and doable.

Then, you can try to ask her to memorize combination of alphabets, numbers or even pictures.

2. Pegging

I honestly think I'm good at memorizing things, Alhamdulillah. If you give me a combination of things, in shaa Allah I can memorize it.. Short term.

How to still remember it tomorrow (long term)?

Here's the trick Puan Lina taught us. Memory pegging. First, you need to peg each number to each thing. It can be anything but make sure you remember it for the rest of your life.

Example:
1. Unicorn
2. Bicycle
3. Triangle

And here's the list of things that you need to remember:
1. Egg
2. Bread
3. Milk

How to memorize it in sequence and in a long term is to peg the thing that you need to memorize to the pegging that you created. Create a story, the more ridiculous the story is, the better.

Example:
1. There's an egg stuck at the end of the unicorn's horn
2. A bicycle that sells bread macam Bai Roti
3. The triangle shape of the box of your milk

It can even apply to other languages, we tried that in class. Works like magic :) Only that you need to create a story fast, and like almost any other things in the world, that takes a lot of practice.

3. Linking

If you need to memorize a series of pictures, try to make a story out of it.

Let's say I ask you to memorize a picture of a rabbit, a house, a strawberry, a flower, and a cup of hot chocolate.

Link each picture together and create a story out of it.

For example, a rabbit enters a house that smells like strawberry, but actually it is a smell of a flower inside a cup of hot chocolate.

Easy peasy, I memorized ten random pictures in a jiffy, how cool is that? Still remember the pictures that I memorized last Saturday up to the point I typed my post.

4. Memorize numbers in a group.

If I give you a random set of numbers:

92846090

How fast can you memorize this set?

The tip is to memorize it in a group.

Try and it works for me!!

5. Speed reading

Reading is my passion. In average I believe I read one book a month. I don't have a problem with speed reading.

But it's a skill that can be easily mastered if you teach your children how to do it.

Rather than reading each word with a stop, try to increase to make it two words with a stop, then 3. Eventually in the end, you'll just read the whole sentence or paragraph at one go.

6. Awareness

Creating awareness to your children towards their surrounding helps stimulating their right brain as well.

For example, show this flash card to them to teach them A, B, C.

Then, hide the flashcard and ask the following questions to exercise their brain to be alert all the time.

Examples:

1. What colour is the ape?
2. How many legs of the apes can you see?

That's all for my sharing session today. Good luck Mommies!! Please please please join her class if you have the opportunity to, very inspiring la this lady!

So in love.

It's been a while since I last update on my Lil ones.

It's been a devastating beginning of year for me. A few weeks ago, my uncle was diagnosed to have 4th stage lung cancer and he passed away 2 days after. A week afterwards.. my aunt passed away due to high blood pressure. Hence the silence.

I haven't even over Uncle Mi whom passed away on my birthday.. Khaira still asked every now and then, "Lama Tok Mi tak datang.. kenapa?"

Khaira is healthy as always Alhamdulillah. Getting more intelligent. About to master her fatha, qasra, and dhamma. Manja as ever.

The only time I brought her to my lab and  yay she behaves well!!

During my morning sickness moment she would always check on me, "ibu ok? Nak muntah ke?" And massaged me here and there. So like Abi.

She found joy feeding me my acid folic every night. Last night I was so tired I fell asleep first. She was about to fall asleep in my arms when she whispered, "Ibu.."

I opened my eyes and those were her following words, "belum makan ubat."

So with all might, she got out the bed, took all the hassle to get my medicine and religiously feed me the acid folic.

How to not love this girl. She's an angel. Alhamdulillah.

My talk on "Finishing PhD on time - how I did it"

The story must be a little bit basi by this time around. Gosh I was sooo busy.. feel like I'm still doing my phd. Catching with the aftermaths of phd, the projects that I cleverly committed myself into, the professional engineeringship I was chasing and of course the gentle birth I'm preparing myself for.

Exhausted.

Yet the talk I gave for my uni on how I finish my phd on time was an excellent one. Omg I got so many positive vibes afterwards, overwhelming with people came from other uni as well to thank me and hugs me. Overflowed with emails and whatsapps.

I was so flattered and happy to have the opportunity to inspire people. I guess when you make people happy you're just thousand times happier.

Some of my lecturers during bachelor degree messaged me afterwards to congratulate on the success of the talk. But I must say this one brings tears to my eyes.. and boy was I glad I made him proud.

The uni is in progress of publishing the video online. Will share with you the link in shaa Allah. :) and will share more on the content of the talk. So busy I actualy typed this in the middle of my conference.

Currently busy with..

Wish me luck!! *nervous*

Literature Review

Hello dearest researchers!!

Today I'm in the mood to write steps on how to start your literature review. Here goes..

1. Define your scope

So, once you have a brief idea about what to do for your PhD and Master, you need to define your scope. This becomes your 'Scope of work'.

The importance of defining your scope are:
1) To tell the examiner that our work is only this much.
2) For ease of writing Chapter 2.

My favorite method in defining the scope is by using Prof Khazani's K-chart method. Since I am not entitled to teach K-chart here (I heard that it is copyrighted), I would strongly suggest you to join Prof Khazani's talk should he provide any. Nonetheless, I share with you my K-chart here. The ones I bold are the focus of my study and the ones I did not bold is to tell the examiner that this is out of my scope.

2. Plan

Planning is the most crucial part that has been neglected by many. I shall caps lock it, bold, highlight, enlarge, whatever to stress the importance of planning.

Many times I found researchers got up all panicked trying to do everything but ended up with almost nothing. Take your time to plan, set some time to study about it. Let's say if your study is about Honda City, give yourself a couple of weeks to study first about cars in general. Google for tutorial about cars. Strengthen your foundation. Then only you study the difference between continental cars and Japanese cars. Then, you refine your scope to the difference between Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi in terms of their technology.

You see, it doesn't matter if the planning take quite some times. It is worth it. You understand better rather than jumping here and there without understanding the big picture of your research. It's okay to go slow, rather than having to go back every now and then with little understanding in the end, trust me.

3. Read, read, read

I read the first time to get the overview and the theoretical background of a paper.

Twice until perhaps 15 to 16 times to understand the work. Then I extracted the advantages and disadvantages.

And again to know the software or hardware used and the parameters studied.

Again during thesis writing, to see how they write their results.

Unless you're a super genius, you can't understand a paper just by reading it once. What you might do is that you might misunderstand the whole paper due to assumption.

4. A proper documentation

Because you're gonna read it again and again and again, might as well have a proper documentation. This is my documentation from the first EPON DBA was published in 2001 until 2012, everything I can get my hands on (journals only).

5. Come out with a table

For ease of writing, because remember you're gonna write your critical review years after your read these papers. To help you refresh back my memory, I come up with this.. :)