Post Term 1

 

I mentioned earlier that Doll returned home with two books from school. One book in Mandarin and the other in English. She rattled off when I asked her to read but I knew she was reading it off her head i.e she didn't truly recognise the words.

 

True to myself, I refused to let this go and decided to strike while the iron is hot. Since she has the words in her head, I thought what best time than now to teach her to read these words. And so, we embarked into our reading journey!

 

 

 

This was the Mandarin book. The photo is a little blurry- whoops.

 

A peek inside the book. I was alittle surprise that the school used this book; I thought it was a little too wordy and challenging for a nursery student.

 

(Some readers may ask me where to purchase this book. I have not seen it in any retail shop. I reckon that the publisher only sells these books to school specifically not to individuals.)

 

Like most Chinese readers, the book came with word cards and to my pleasant surprise, picture cards too! I LOVE IT!

 

However, I quickly found fault with the given cards. The characters are not separated into individual cards. For instance, "糖果" is printed on one card. If we use this, the child may read the words as one- she may not recognise the individual words i.e. "糖" or/and "果" if we split the characters up.

 

And that explains why I made my own cards with each character printed onto a card. :I Just as I suspected, Doll didn't know how to read when I split the characters up.

 

And the beauty of splitting the characters is that I can shuffle the cards and have Doll searched the lot and build a sentence, one character at a time. As you can see, I am a stickler for reading every single word. I refuse to acknowledge that she can read until she can clearly read each and every word with or without the accompanying characters.

 

I have to say, I would never have thought to introduce these words at nursery level. I think my primary two boy cannot even read words like "辣椒". But oh well, I am grateful that the school did in a way.

 

Here's the English reader she brought back. I had to cut away the top part of the book as her name is on it.

 

A very apt book, repeated words and simple.

 

Like the Chinese cards, I made my own word cards. It didn't come with any learning cards. Again, I split the words. The words that appear on the book are 'painting, playing' etc. I want her to recognise the root words i.e  'paint, play'.  

 

Lastly, because of the book she recognises the word 'at'. I seized this chance to try blending phonics with her. I prepared an 'at' word card and whipped out my DIY movable alphabet.

 

I placed the consonants that make up words with 'at'. I showed her that if 'C' is in front of 'at', it sounds out as  'K' + 'at" which makes 'cat' and so on. She did wonderfully well to my surprise (because I am not a believer of phonics, truth be told). All of a sudden, she could read 'mat', 'sat', 'rat' etc. Also, she can now spell the words without any visual aids.

 

And so, I am somewhat a bought over by phonics. I am quite impressed. Hmmm.