Chinese
I bought Le Xin this very cool book "看图说话" (Look at the picture and say the word) from Popular book shop, it's $12+! A thematic book to help me teach Le Xin words in Chinese.
Le Xin is currently learning how to say the names of pictures in Chinese. Well, there's a saying every time you teach you are learning twice and I couldn't agree more because while covering the first topic with Le Xin on "Parts of the body" I picked up some Mandarin words too. How many of you actually know what's elbow, ankle or wrist in Mandarin? I don't know if it's only me but I actually do not know how to say those words in Mandarin. All thanks to a book like this, I could also learn together with Le Xin. This book also comes with an audio CD which serves as a pronunciation guide! How cool is it?
Next, I tried to say a body part in Mandarin and she responded by pointing to it. In this case, it was 脸颊 (cheek)
I also bought an assessment book to use it as a reference to guide Le Xin in learning the language. Most of the time I converse with her in English but I am trying to speak Chinese with her too. I put in my best effort when it comes to teaching Chinese because I can't really read or write well in that language but I am sure we can always learn together as long as we have the right attitude!
Le Xin was trying to identify some high frequency words in Mandarin. We just go through one page a day, focusing on reading and not writing. I also read to her the text in the bubble boxes (fortunately there's han yu ping yin above every word)
Today there's a box which she was supposed to draw her brother. She doesn't have a brother but still I asked her to think of a younger friend that she knew and draw his face.
Her representation of 弟弟 (what's up with the 扫把头 - broom head?) haha :)
We enjoyed coloring the pictures in the book. Colouring is one of the good ways to refine fine motor skill in my opinion, and yes I always colour with her. As she was colouring she said Mummy you always like to colour with me right? because if I colour the pictures alone I will feel so bored and lonely right? Now tell me how can I leave her alone to do the colouring when she said those stuff to me (cough cough I kinda feel like she was emotionally threatening me ---> must have learned this trick from my dad)
Math
I bought this schedule board from Daiso but it ended up as a calendar for Le Xin. She will paste a number sticker daily in the box. Yesterday she said Today is Wednesday, I am going for my art class at Artistori! What a good way to learn about days of the week and yes numbers too!
I played a simple Math game with Le Xin to reinforce the concept of counting. Firstly, I played some Christmas carols and she began running around a mahjong paper, when I paused the song, I shouted a number say "8" and she would run and pick up a crayon of her choice and wrote the number "8" on the mahjong paper.
Next, she selected some stickers....
and pasted them below the number. She was also counting the stickers while pasting them (objective met!)
Lastly, she drew a black circle around the number and stickers to form a group! (Hence, learning the concept of creating sets)
Instead of running around the paper, she also paused to do a wiggly dance.... (Super duper cute!)
Completed! Hooray :)
Language and Literacy
After reading a series of Ladybird readers with Le Xin, I typed out the high frequency words from the storybooks on Powerpoint slides. So if I am showering, Le Xin will get on the lappy and practise reading those words aloud. I call this HFW-E-Learning! You should try this if you want to teach your child/student how to read.... Easy?
Just a quick explanation of how this is done. For example; the word --->"soft" I will break up the word and highlight the letters in different colours to aid her to sound out the letters/diagraph and then blend and read. Therefore the word "soft" will look like this on PPT soft but once she learn how to recognise the word I will change the font to black so that she does not always have to depend on the colour cue to read.
For certain words like the "one" which I can't really get her to use phonics to sound out. I will use other method to help her remember and recognise. As you can see in the photo above, I highlighted the two letters "o" and "n" in red and the letter "e" in blue because I told her one is simply the word "on" plus the letter "e" behind. Haha not quite logical I know...but this is just a method that I used to help myself memorize chunks of info when I was in poly I may or may not break words into syllabus, it all depends.....
Project Work - Reading and Creative Writing!
We went to the library to borrow a few books for our project. This is probably one of the best book on Christmas - a detailed yet relatively easy book for preschoolers to learn more about the festival!
Le Xin was browsing through the book. Next, I just read a few pages of the book to her first so as not to overwhelm her with too much information.
Next, I got her to do a little write up on Christmas. There she is....writing her name :)
She also drew a Christmas tree in the box.
Colouring the picture she drew....
Little hand @ work
She wrote a simple sentence about Christmas and read the sentence to me ..... Then she began to feel a little restless, she kept asking me if I could play balloon with her so I said Alright let's continue tomorrow :) A great tip which I've read from one parenting book: Always stop before the interest runs out!
Reflection:
It's sad when I hear parents telling me that they can't teach their children because they just do not know how to. Teaching and learning with your child/children can be both fun and easy.To top it off, it's extremely REWARDING too. All you need is patience and creativity.
Patient enough to wait for your child to respond to you even when he/she might not understand what you are trying to do for the very first time and creative enough to always come up with exciting and innovative ways to introduce some new ideas!
It's a lot of effort involved and yes it's hard work I never say it is EASY but when you learn to value the learning process you will do it because it's worth it!
The past two days, I reckoned that Le Xin has developed a very strong bond with me. I particularly enjoyed the part where she sat on my lap to paste the stickers on the mahjong paper, that moment was PRICELESS! I sat with her every time she pasted the stickers...(Thank God for the patience He gave to me) Number 10 seems to take forever though because she counted again and again but I am willing to wait for her as long as she enjoys my company!
As for creativity, I just thought of that idea spontaneously when she handed me a pack of stickers that her teacher gave to her in school. Anyway, these day you can actually find lots of teaching resources on the Internet. Blogs and Pinterest consist of many great ideas that you can tap on. So no excuse for any teacher or parent okay?
Ending this post with two of her videos!
