Notes on Learning to Read – How To Help Your Child by ESF Kindergarten (Part 2)

Things that make you go "Hhmmmm..."

List of stuff you can do to help your child learn to read:

1)     Lots of pre-reading experiences. Listening to stories repeatedly, rhymes, songs.

2)     Point out text in the environment. Exit signs, billboards.

3)     Cover the rest of the word, let your child guess based on the first letter.

As in Car. Fish. Bus. Not as in Philosophy.

4)     Later on, cover the last word or just cover nouns or verbs. (Check yourself as to whether you are blindly covering things up)

5)     Don’t forget to give your child time to process, when they get stuck. But also remember to move on and not stay stuck. You are supposed to be reading your child a story, enjoying the shared experience, not morphing into that dark alter ego, Kiasu Psychomum. Allow them to make mistakes.

6)     Play games like I spy. Or count the number of ‘And’s or ‘The’s.

7)     Label stuff around the house (or child’s room)

8)     Have paper and pens and stuff for kids to make their own story books. You may have to relinquish the stapler if he thinks that’s the best part.

My mum got me to write (more, in lower primary) by selecting passages out of encyclopedias for me to copy into a scrapbook about animals (my favorite – I wanted to be a vet, as a child) that also included sections for personal experiences, facts like hamster gestation periods (very important when later you start breeding hamsters like I did), photos and postcards I would search for in airports.

I still have this book today.

9)     Check for comprehension in case your child is totally memorizing all your reading materials. (For eg Rockstar in da house. Have “Rockstar” and “house” exchange places and see what he says.)

10)  Never forget to make it enjoyable and adjust to your child.

Oh M-UM...

In the car yesterday:

Me: I spy something that begins with the letter B.

Rockstar: Don’t know.

Me: <Trying to hide my dismay> Bus, Rockstar! (Thinking: Oh no, wasn’t that a really easy one??)

Rockstar: <Very prissy> That is not “a bus”. That is a double decker bus. That starts with D.

Me: Ok, fine. And I spy something else that begins with the letter D. (Pointing at JD sitting in the front seat of the car).

Rockstar: Don’t see anything.

Me: <anxiously> Isn’t JD a dog? (After much prompting and seeing a perfect afternoon of I Spy go down the drain.)

Rockstar: No. She’s a Border Collie.

Me: (Muttering to myself) And we’re a smartass.

Rockstar: <triumphantly> S! That begins with an S!

(Notes to self:

1. Remember to go slow for awhile… Because Rockstar’s Putonghua lessons going on simultaneously have him learning to read right-to-left (English being left to right). He’s been scribbling some numbers (his favorite thing to write) from right to left…
2. Pay more attention to the books I’m getting Rockstar (I blindly got him collecting Mr Men and Little Misses after he was picking up useless little matchbox cars as the occasional treat because I wanted him to like the concept of picking up books when we travelled and Mr Men was the most collectible bunch we could find everywhere we went, from the Westwood Well Come in Pok Fu Lam to the Borders on Orchard Road and umpteen bookstores in the States or Australia. He counts his collection out every bedtime… Except I hadn’t thought about what was/wasn’t actually in the books.) Must check out Dr Seuss as recommended by his school…
   
3. Have. To. Find a way to adjust. From doing some of the exercises, I realized Rockstar tries to memorize text as quickly as possible so as to answer correctly. Because he hates making mistakes. This is a child who sometimes insists on making umpteen trips to the sink because he has paint on his hand that’s distracting him from finishing a picture.
4. Stop falling asleep while reading to Rockstar. Our day-to-day conversations can be exhausting – this one’s hard.)

And so we laughed. We learnt. And I walked away from that one hour session with the sense of being prepped to help the Rockstar learn, via our interactions at home, as a parent aware of learning strengths and weaknesses specific to my child.

Much cheaper than therapy.