Doing Spelling With His Favourite Movies

Here is yet another spelling/word game we play to enhance JS' word recognition/spelling skill. Being a movie addict, he is more than happy to do his spelling this way.

To keep things simple, I chose movies that he loved and had fewer words like "Frozen" and "The Lego Movie", which was his latest craze. There was no way of stopping him from singing "Everything Is Awesome!". He would sing it all day long and that included while having dinner at a restaurant and while doing our marketing at the hypermarket. I had to keep on reminding him to tone down  his voice otherwise, everyone would be looking at him (or me, for not being able to keep a toddler from causing noise pollution). 

The materials needed are some wooden or plastic alphabets, paper plates and DVDs. We got ourselves six DVDs for this activity and thus, we need six paper plates where I would put the alphabets in for him to arrange. 

After making sure he had the correct number of paper plates, JS had to collect the sets of alphabets from me. 

Then he would pick a DVD. 

 He would have to spell and read the title of the movie.

Next, he had to look for the plate with the correct set of alphabets and 

arrange them accordingly. 

Here are the six movies titles he spelt. If we had more time, we would usually do Q&A or "Tell About". For the first, I would do the asking and he, the answering. As for the latter, he would just pick one of the movies and tell me the story. 

You could also use storybooks or flashcards instead of DVDs for this activity. 

Lets Learn Chinese

OK. Obviously, I am not sure whether I am doing this correctly. I   only learnt Mandarin when I was in preschool and so, teaching  it to JS is a great challenge for me. This is our third session. For the first two, we only made flashcards with pictures and the characters, which I shall discuss in a different post. 

I prefer to do it on large art blocks, similar to our alphabet and number activities so I came up with this. Besides character recognition, I wanted to incorporate simple activities and a rhyme so I was glad that I finally found some good preschool books that I could use. 

JS learnt this character a few months ago when he was still attending school. For a start, I always like to make things simple for him. It's a way I use to boost his confidence when it comes to doing a new activity. It is "hand" and in Mandarin, we read it as "shou". 

I drew a hand at one corner of the art block and traced the character at the other corner. He had to stick the character on and put a picture of a hand next to it. 

Then we proceed to "shuang shou" which means, "both hands". For some extra activities, he had to trace his hands next to the phrase. 

Next, we proceeded to two other phrases that has the word "hand" in them. They were "hui shou" (wave) and "pai shou" (clap). 

I found two other pictures for clap and wave so, some extra activities for JS, where he had to stick the pictures correctly beside their respective phrases. 

And lastly, we read the rhyme. 

One Word Chart, A Variety of Activities

This worksheet was one of JS' first "formal education" which I started with him when he was two and a half. At that time, what I had in mind was still the "very Malaysian parent" way of teaching where we begin with alphabets and words so this was what we did. I knew that my son would not be able to sit still to learn the alphabets using a chart so I made him create his own. I think he learnt more because he did most of the work and at the same time, it helped him to develop his  motor skills. 

He already knew most of the capital letters when we did this activity. I think this helped a lot in making him enjoy making the charts because it was something that he was familiar with. I would include some words that he already knew instead of introducing a set of totally new words. My purpose was to build confidence in him that he was able to do the task and then learn two to three new words. I think having confidence in himself is crucial for further learning.

The materials needed for this activity are foam sheets, glue stick (less messy and easy to handle), double sided tapes, labeling stickers, markers, pictures and A2 size art block. I used an easel too because I think he would be able to see the chart better that way. 

I wrote the words on the art block for him as a guide not to stick the pictures too near or too far from each other. 

This is how the charts look like. 

I was not really particular with him knowing exactly the spelling of the words or why "lion" is on the "L" chart and not the "K" chart, "elephant" is on the "E" chart and not on the "B" chart, etc. My objective was for him to be able to complete a specific task, learn both the capital and small letters, new words and to enjoy the activity. 

After he completed all the 26 letters, we moved on to letter recognition where he had to find the letter of the chart from the words and highlight them. 

When he started to show interest in learning words, I made him spell the words on the chart using the wooden alphabets. As the words on the chart are written in small letter and the wooden alphabets are in capital letters, this activity also helped him to strengthen his knowledge in both the upper and lower cases as he often mistaken the small letter "l" for capital letter "I" and "b" for "d" and vice versa. 

I am glad we made these charts as they can be used for a variety of activities. 

Cultivating the Habit of Reading

THE FIRST STEP

My son was exposed to a lot of TV and YouTube videos since he was 1 year old. During that time, I did not know that such exposure would eventually lead to some kind of resistance to books. When I read to him during bedtime stories, he could not really understand the stories and showed no interest at all. He would not sit with me when I read to him and this somewhat discouraged me from continuing the act. Fortunately, my husband advised me to keep on reading to him even if he doesn't seem to be interested. True enough, he was actually listening to the stories because a few months later, he could say certain words at the right time as I read. 

The first books we bought for him was "Three Little Pigs", "A Story A Day", "Now I Can Read" (it's a collection of stories) and one with a collection of nursery rhymes. 

For bedtime stories, we would read a story from "A Story A Day" to him, and a few months down the road, he was able to select the stories that he wanted to listen to. Then, he started to have interest in a certain story, for example "Tough Tommy" and would request only for the story to be read every night for several times. Perhaps he was trying to memorize the story because after sometime, he was able to recite the first two paragraphs of the story with minimal guidance and a few words from every sentence thereafter. 

GETTING HIM TO SIT DOWN AND READ TOGETHER WITH US

A pop-up book entitled: I'm a Clown

Well, that was about bedtime stories where we do the reading and he just listened. Things were different when we made him sit down to read together with us (read after us). I started him off with classic tales like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Ant and the Grasshopper" but they were too long for his attention span. So, to encourage him to read, I decided to buy books with less words and more interesting features to attract him to "look at the book" for a longer period of time. 

The first such book that I bought was with pop-up pictures but it somehow was not able to catch his attention too. He even tore the first page of the book. 

For a second try, I bought him a collection of "Lift-the-Flap" books on animals. This, on the other hand caught his attention and he was able to finish a book without me trying hard to hold his attention. 

A "Lift-the-Flap" Board Book entitled: Who Is Hiding In the Farmyard?

Here are some other books with fun features that I bought for him. 

A book with "Pull the Tabs" feature

A "Complete the Scenes with Stickers" Book

After 2 years of regular exposure to books, I am glad to say that JS is able to sit down and try to read on his own now. He could not read the words yet but he would recite the stories that he has already memorized and turn the pages accordingly. I hope that he would pick up the words soon as he continue to do so.