I have been procrastinating about writing this post for a very long time. Think I better overcome the inertia now and get it going.
In terms of English, I have been focusing mainly on reading skills since Le Xuan was 3 years old. And that was when I started her with the Peter and Jane series and several Leap Frog (Tad and Lily) DVDs. I also bought the Brain Quest cards and sticker books that she could play with and trained her thinking skills as well. To complement her reading skills, we also played games like treasure hunt and charades. Oh and I pretended to be Barney who wrote letters to her too, haha.
Didn't really think it was necessary to start her on writing until she started her music lessons that required her to write the basic ABCs. That was when she was 3.5 years old. It wasn't an easy feat for both Le Xuan and myself when it comes to writing, haha. But I could vaguely remember that I started teaching her on alphabets that consist of only straight lines (e.g. A, E, F) before moving on to those that have curves (e.g. B, C, D).
After she has mastered her writing, the next step was spelling which requires her to be pretty good with her phonics. But I think reading seemed easier to Le Xuan than spelling. Reading requires her to blend the letters but spelling requires her to break the words into phonetic sounds and linking them to the correct alphabets. But I'm thankful that her school teachers at MMI are doing a great job at honing her phonetic skills and spelling and as for me, I managed to find a website (primaryresources.co.uk) that I can reference to guide Le Xuan with her spelling in a more systematic way. In fact, I'm also learning at the same time while I teach her as I was not taught phonics during my time. Some games that we played to cultivate her interest in spelling will be Hangman, the word jumble game, or spelling on mama's whiteboard (haha). I also compiled a list of common words (some are quite tricky) to practice with her sometimes: He, She, We, Me, My, You, His, Her, Was, Saw, Has, Yes, No, Put, Are, All, See, Some, Come, Have, They, Here, There, Said, Where, When, What, How, Who, Were, Why, Them, Their, Our, Your, Us. To make it a bit more interesting, I came out with some short sentences that include these common words for her to write, which can also introduce her to punctuation like full stop, question and exclamation mark. As for activity books, she's only practicing the High Frequency Action Words book (by Christabel Hong) about twice a week, thought it will be so boring or even kill her interest in learning if it's about activity books every day.
Now how about Mathematics? It's all about learning through games. For a start, I thought Le Xuan should try to recognise numbers besides 1 to 10. I must say the Bingo game really helped a lot. As for counting up to 100, I find the snakes and ladders game very useful too. Being able to count up will help her with simple addition and slowly we started learning how to count down that helped with subtraction. To get her more interested in addition and subtraction, I came out with Le Xuan's favourite Cashier and Customer game and cut out lots of 'money' in $1, $2, $5, $10 denominations. Through this game, she also learnt how to count by twos, fives and tens. When she's more comfortable with these denominations, I added in the $20, $50, $100, $1000 and also small chips that represented the cents. Besides the cashier and customer game, we also played the all time favourite Monopoly! It was really fun and Le Xuan was quite addicted to it for a period of time. And almost forgot another game that I made for her, which is the Peg the Numbers Game. She totally enjoyed pegging the number cards that reflected the answers to the questions on the pegs.
I was quite shocked when her school started asking questions like: 4 more than 62 is ____. The number that come right before 52 is ____. This seemed to be testing her on her English, so I had to explain further to help her understand. Recently, in order to help her with the addition and subtraction of two digit numbers, I came out with strips of ten beads that stand for tens, and single beads that stand for the ones. Through this game, I hope it can help her to better visualize and understand the rationale behind the workings for addition and subtraction. As for multiplication and division, maybe next year when she's K2.
As for Chinese, I totally left the responsibility to Mum, but I could see that she's beaming with pride when Le Xuan's chinese teacher feedback that Le Xuan is strong in her chinese language, LOL.
How about Science? I have recently chanced upon this interesting comic called the Young Scientist which teaches science in an interesting way through comic. Le Xuan was very excited when she knew that I have taken up the monthly subscription for the Level 1 Young Scientist. Hope that this will instill her interest in the area of science. Hasn't really seen any good activity books for science yet, thought it's more fun to learn through the comic instead. Besides the comic, I make it a point to do experiments with her every Wednesday, introducing her what's hypothesis and conclusion. Haha, and also that experiments can fail sometimes :P
And of course not forgetting her piano! Papa made the effort to practise with her everyday, either theory or practical. With both Ms Lena Tan and Papa's guidance, I can see that Le Xuan is getting more and more musically inclined. Really hope that she can persevere in learning piano which i'm sure will benefit her for a lifetime.
No comments:
Post a Comment