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. 

Learning From Mistakes

Can you guess what we were making based on this picture? The picture in the book and the four orange caps should be obvious clues that we were making a... (I think you should get the idea and yes, it's a) bus!   "The Wheels On The Bus" is a children's song which JS learnt to sing when he was one. Initially, I wanted us to make a song sheet but we ended up with an art and craft project instead. 

As you can see in the below pictures, JS made a cutting mistake right at the beginning of the project. I was supposed to make a whole at the centre of the rectangle for him to start cutting out the rectangle to make the windscreen of the bus but he was too excited to start cutting that he went ahead and made that cut. 

He went on cutting and made another mistake. 

Well, these mistakes are welcomed because this is how he learnt to fix them. I asked him where was the other piece of cardboard and told him to try to fix the problem. I was glad that he was able to tell me that he could join the pieces together with sticky tapes.

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Then we went on to add more "paint" on the bus with blue coloured paper and the headlights using two yellow labeling stickers followed by six passengers, a bus driver, the words "School Bus", the plate numbers, wipers and lastly, the wheels. 

So, this is how our school bus looks like. 

JS' First Melody

It was about two years ago when JS hummed his first melody. It was the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Although he has been exposed to many other children's songs since then, this song remains to be his favourite. 

It has been a while since we did a "word and song" activity so I thought that he might be interested to do his favourite song. We combined some art and craft into the activity.

First me made a moon using a bottle cap and some yellow coloured paper.

JS gluing pieces of yellow paper on a bottle cap to make a moon.

While waiting for the moon to dry, JS painted a portion of the song sheet with black poster colour for the sky at night. 

Next, he we did the lyrics of the song. I wrote the lyrics and cut the words out for him to arrange them on the song sheet accordingly. We did not have any hard copy of the lyrics. He had to watch a video from YouTube and learn the words there. 

JS arranging the words on the song sheet.

JS was not able to do the origami stars so I did it for him instead. 

I also found a picture of a boy and a girl looking at the stars. I thought it would go well with our picture. Well, JS said it was the picture of his sister and him watching stars at night. 

Learning Through Songs

JS was exposed to a lot of children songs and nursery rhymes since he was a month old. That was when he came home from the hospital after he was discharged from NICU, as he was a preterm baby. When he was one, I started showing him a lot of children song videos from YouTube. He got hooked on "Barney and Friends" and "Hi5" for quiet a long time before I discovered some other very interesting children song videos by "Super Simple Songs", "Muffin Songs" and "The GiggleBellies" just to name a few. 

I could still remember the first tune that he hummed. It happened on the day after his second birthday. On that morning, as he came downstairs for his breakfast, he hummed the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and I thought: My son could hum a tune! How wonderful!

Since then, singing has been a very important part of his daily activities. He sings whenever he is happy, to his favourite tune of the day and most of the time, he would make up his own lyrics.

In this post, I would like to share with you one of the sessions where we used a song to learn counting, spelling of numbers and sign language (but I don't think it was a proper international sign language for numbers). 

I used the song: Ten Little Fingers

Firstly, he has to count the number of fingers shown in the picture.

Then he did the sign language for that particular number as shown in the picture. It was not in my teaching plan for him to learn the sign language though, he did it on his own for every number that he came across. 

Next, he would look for the spelling of the number.

I gave him sheets of labeling stickers with alphabets written on them. He has to look for the correct alphabets to form the words. 

And lastly, we sang the song! 

It was a brief yet enjoyable session. 

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.