Develop reading habits in children
Most parents who love to read want their children to also love reading. With most children nowadays prefer watching TV and playing computer games than reading, instilling the love of reading can be a challenging task. Here are some good practices if you are serious about developing reading habits in your children.
First of all, collect and surround your children with good books. Your collection must consist of a variety of books with different themes and with colorful and attractive pictures. Allow them to choose the books they are interested in.
The next thing in developing their love and skills in reading is to read aloud the books of their choice. Other than stories, you can also read a lot of books with facts to draw them into the wonderful world of knowledge and of course to broaden their understanding of the world around them.
As a start, get the children in your life the personalized books. Most children will be excited to read a book that mentioned their names and has personalized story lines!
Filed under Parenting, Pre Reading Activities | Comment (0)Read aloud to your child and create phonemic awareness
Parent play an important role in instilling the importance of reading in daily life of their children. The best way to cultivate good reading habit is to start young and to find time to read aloud with your child every day.
Have lap time with picture books and stories, they can strongly motivate your child to enjoy reading. Try to make these books available for your children to explore and enjoy on their own as well. When reading aloud to your child, let your child open the book and turn the pages. Point to the words as you read. Draw attention to repeated phrases, inviting your child to join in each time they occur.
Learning doesn’t have to always be sitting down doing worksheet. One of the ways you can create phonemic awareness in a young child is to make use of printed words he encounters in his daily lives. As you run across letters and words in daily life, make an obvious effort to read aloud signs, billboards, notices, labels on cans, maps, postage tape and phone numbers. You want to say the sound of each letter of the word, for example, say “/b/-/a/-/g/” and then blend the three sounds to create the word. You may also want to draw attention to frequently occurring words as you read the signs with your child and challenge the child to read these words as they arise repeatedly. You can use your regular outings as a way to encourage reading by showing your child how printed words relate to daily living!
Filed under Parenting, Pre Reading Activities | Comment (0)How proper phonics instruction help children to spell?
I dictated 20 words, basically finger spell the words i.e. /k/ /a/ /n/ for can, the dictation process is to help children learn to associate the sounds and their symbols, train their ears to listen, and think to spell, instead of memorizing the whole word as an entire picture.
Compare the work of a 12 years old and a 6 years old.
Joel is 12. Noor is 6.
Noor came to me 4 months ago, have been attending kindie for 2 years, couldn’t read a word in English, couldn’t understand my instruction in English. I had to talk to her in Malay to stop her from crying. For a 6 years old, she did pretty well in this dictation, didn’t she?
Joel joined in last month, his English teacher complaint that he couldn’t spell “fish” and scolded him for being lazy. He has very short attention span, wondering eyes and low self-esteem, failed most subjects in school regularly. I suspect he may have attention problem or learning difficulty or could be just have poor instruction from his kindie years. I gave him a diagnostic test when he joined, he scored 1 word out of 50 words, the score just indicated that he couldn’t spell at all. He probably has poor visual memory and couldn’t store much images of whole words in his long term memory. I have no doubt he would have trouble reading a las vegas strip map as an adult without remedial work.
After joining the class 5 times, he knew the sounds of phonograms A-Z and a couple of the multi -letter phonograms. Though he mixed up the vowels a lot and is still developing his instant association of sounds and symbols.
In today’s dictation, even though I gave him the clue that /p/ /e/ /t/, the /e/ is the first sound of /e/ /E/ (letter e), he still wrote down /p//a//t/. He is going to be challenging, but also the kind of student that need much help to learn to spell and read. I am not so optomistic his parents will be patient to see him building proper foundation and improve from there though.
It’s very sad to see parents placing more emphasis on exams/tests and UPSR than the fact that their 12 years old couldn’t spell, read nor write. I have a couple of kids like this last year, just when they started to get a hang of things and started to “get it” after 5-6 months, their parents pulled them out of the SWR class, because their test scores in school hadn’t improved.
Another girl I had, she came to me at the end of her kindie year, couldn’t read nor spell after staying in the same kindie 8 a.m - 6 p.m since she was 2 1/2 years old. She obviously has attention problem and couldn’t sit still, she showed a lot of reversal problem i.e would write top as pot, map as pam.
Nevertheless, she is a very intelligent girl, she knew all the letter sounds of A to Z within 4 weeks, I only spent 10-15 minutes doing lesson with her every week because she just refused to stay on her chair after the 10-15 minutes, so I let her play with the practical life activities I have.
After 3 months, she just told her mother than she thought she could read the sentences we had for dictation. Her mother must have been doubtful, so she wanted to show off to her mother by reading the sentences I wrote on the white board when she came to pick her up. Her mother was really impressed. Her mother also told me that school had aways been a drag but she was a little puzzled what did I do with her daughter that make her so eager to come to my class and was always reminding her in the morning though our session didn’t start till evening.
Of course I skipped the part that her daughter was “playing” for 45 minutes and only had lessons for 15 minutes.:-)
Actually, the girl’s concentration has improved a lot as her self esteem was boosted and for the first time, words make sense! Then, she started year 1. So her mother decided to quit this not so relevant class because she wanted to send her to a couple of other tuition classes and time runs out. I felt sad, but there is really nothing I can do to convince these parents that basic skills like spelling and reading are more important than doing the same question 101 ways so that they can score in their tests.
Filed under Learning problem, Pre Reading Activities | Comments (3)Development Required Before a Child Can Read
What is developmental appropriate activities? Making 2-3 years old holding a pencil with the wrong grip is setting her up for lifelong hatred of writing. Flashing cards to wigglers who can’t sit still for 20 seconds is setting ourselves for frustrations.
Parents came to me and said their 4 years old is “slow” because the academic progress is not as satisfactory. Usually, almost everytime, it’s because the developmental needs of the child were not addressed. If a child can’t concentrate for 20 seconds, he won’t be able to read and sit still to learn, and that is the underlying reasons why he is not “performing” academically.
In an authentic Montessori classroom, we prepare the children by allowing them to develop the right skills required for academic success, namely: ability to focus/concentrate and love of learning.
What are the developmentally needs and how do we prepare them?
Developmental Preparation
1. Sensorial development to receive information
2. Perceptual development in order to organize, understand and integrate information.
3. Neurological(tactal, stereognostic, etc) to utilize information in a physical manner.
4. Social development of interpersonal relationships to relate to people and events.
5. Symbolic development in order to decode.
6. Concept fromation
7. Verbal language
8. Visual language reading
Development Needed
1. Gross motor control
2. Fine muscle control
3. Eye-hand coordination
4. Ability to perceive figure in space (walking on line, etc)
5. Directionality (top-bottom, right-left, etc)
6. Ability to organize a temporal, spatial relationship (understanding, difference between in and on)
7. Ability to differentiate contrasting symbol and sound i.e. “a” and “t” is a good contrast in sound and symbol “b” and “p” are too similar .
8. Ability to classify
9. Ability to udnerstand conceptions presented in text (content meaning)
10. Well developed auditory discrimination
11. Ability to focus and listen to verbal instructions
12 General ability to focus on the task on hand.
Reference: “what’s involved in being Able to Read” Ellen de HArt Young Children, March 1968
Some of the activities and games that we used in the Montessori classroom to help to aid this developmental needs and develop the necessary skills.
http://joymontessori.blogspot.com/2007/01/sound-cylinders.html
http://joymontessori.blogspot.com/2007/01/visual-discrimination-cards.html
http://joymontessori.blogspot.com/2007/01/pre-reading-exercises.html
Filed under Pre Reading Activities, learning | Comment (1)Visual Discrimination Cards
Materials:
A tray containing:
(1) deck of visual discrimination cards in a basket (red?)
(1) deck of visual discrimination cards in a basket (green?)
Preparation:
The Visual Discrimination Cards may be purchased from various educational supply stores. Or, you may make your own cards by mounting drawings/pictures on 3” squares of poster board. I have made three sets here that you may download for your own use:
(right click and “save target as”)
Visual Discrimination Cards set 1 (pdf)
Visual Discrimination Cards set 2 (pdf)
Visual Discrimination Cards set 3 (pdf)
General Presentation - Introduction:
1. Invite the children to join you on the rug.
2. Invite everyone to sit down (in circle or as a group – your choice).
3. Tell the children that you are going to show them a very special deck of cards.
4. Explain to the children that they will need to look very closely at each picture in order to match them.
5. Remove the basket from the tray that contains the red deck of cards.
6. Place the cards in a horizontal line in front of yourself, left to right.
7. Put the empty basket back on the tray.
8. Remove the basket from the tray that contains the white deck of cards.
9. Place the basket right in front of you.
10. Take the first card and hold it while scanning below the red cards to find a match. Place the matched card below it’s partner.
11. Repeat until all the red and white cards are matched.
Variations and Extensions:
1. Use different cards/objects
2. Talk about the differences
Points of Interest:
1. It takes time to study the pictures
Control of Error:
1. Cards aren’t matched.
Aims:
Visual discrimination, ability to match, preparation for writing and reading, eye tracking from left to right, etc.
Age:
2 ½ and up
Language:
Same, different, etc.
