Had been wanting to write a series about this but felt lazy. So I thought I would write a short one and maybe someday I’ll write more.

He loves the story, ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ so much and would do a jiggle of happiness when he heard us recite ,”I..am…Sam…” or say “Would you eat them with a ….”. We like to say it to him sometimes just while walking without the book but til now, I still could not memorise all the sentences. There are just too many. Sometimes, I just try to make up some middle sentences… as long as I end with the “I do not like Green Eggs and Ham..I do not like them, Sam-I-Am!!”

Yesterday, it was rather surprising that when I tore off some bread and was putting it close to his mouth, he sprouted, “Eat!” and then, “Mum..mum”. Whoa! He finally understood the eating action as ‘eat’. I believe it was largely due to the above story, because we kept telling him all the time. It was the first time he said this word.

The most surprising thing was, during bathtime, I was playing building words with him and when I put this up:

He told me, “Eat!” Very clear and concise. I mean, he could voice it did not mean he could read it. Wow, He really knows how to read more words than we thought! We don’t really test him til we play games with him so we are always surprised.

Recently, I was reading Mem Fox’s Reading Magic and 1+1+1=1′s post on ‘How to Teach Reading‘ and I agreed totally with them.

The Magic to your child learning to read is really just, Read A-Loud To Them! Really!  You can be a busy working mom but if you spend time reading to your child for a few minutes daily, your child would learn to read many words by himself soon.

It IS working for me now because I had been busy working on my photo projects and had not been doing much learning with Dar since he entered CC. All we did was to watch story videos and read some selected books again and again. And suddenly, he’s letting us know that he could read those words which we never taught him.

Really? Yes. We did not use Flashcard with words on it and deliberately say, “Dar, this is….” ALL we did was read the stories and he picked them up because he was seeing those words appearing again and again in different books! For example, I was teaching him, “Car”, “Fish” during our weekly lessons and just showing the picture of the word in question and reading books related to it but he never actually pronounced ‘Fish’ nor read it. Suddenly now that we are no longer doing those stuff and just reading and reading the books we had, he could read them and pronounced them exactly. It’s because the words had more meaning to him in a story than as an isolated word!

And these two words appeared in his favourite storybook, “My World”. We read it to him so many times for several weeks. And he learnt ‘Daddy’ from here too…

Example is this passage: “My fish. Daddy’s fish. When you catch a fish you make a wish”. He loves this passage a lot and would specially walk over to the fish tank to point at the fishes. To us, the story in the “My World” doesn’t make sense, but to a child, it’s repetition and repetition of the same few words throughout the whole book that rhymes coupled with some graphics and he could understand it.

With Darius, I had tried many different ways of learning. We started with reading one storybook weekly to get a feel for print, watched videos that flash whole words, watched LeapFrog video that teaches phonics, did learning of letters weekly, did learning of a new word in a thematic approach weekly. I also introduced sight words storybooks like the Peter and Jane Series and the phonics readers such as Usborne’s books.

So far for him I feel that learning word as a whole in a sentence and in a story is working better (Whole Language approach), coupled with some phonics learning. He is able to read a lot of different words now, mostly in his storybooks and had real meaning to his life, like the animals, elephant, giraffe, tiger (figurines he has), body parts or objects like table, chairs, clock that he sees everyday.

I also agree with the fact that “Learning words in whole allows the children to learn their letters and sounds in the real context of reading and writing“. Mem Fox further confirmed it for me when she mentioned that children who only learn by the phonics method knows how to read each word for sure but they do not understand the whole context of the story. Able to read but not able to comprehend what the story is talking about – That is not true reading.

Her method was actually to, “Read aloud to the child –> The child memorises the sound of the word –> gradually sees the pattern of how the alphabets combine to make that sound –> know the phonemes (sound of the letter) –> then only know what alphabets they are made up of.” This is a totally reverse approach in that most people usually think of reading as “know the alphabets first, then the phonics, then go on to the whole word”. This theory is interesting and made me realised that we had been doing some of this with Dar too!

We had been reading storybooks to him since he was just a few months old and now he has suddenly started reading several words by himself even before he turned two. Then, he started reading unknown words (words that does not appear anywhere in storybooks nor taught to him) using the phonics knowledge he has and when we exchanged one letter of a word with the other, he was able to read them too! By guessing at their sound. That’s how he read the words below when I tested him for the first time yesterday,

“Hot, Cot, Sot”… He just replaced the sound of the first letter(hah to ccc to sss)  since he knows that’s the pattern. As for how he read ‘Hot’, I was surprised too but I remembered it was from a Hooked on Phonics video I had been showing to him so he remembered the ‘Hot’ from sight.  Cot and Sot had never appeared anywhere for us but he was able to read it exactly as it sounded. And S was just a letter that I quickly fished out of the basin to put on. I did not even know the meaning til I googled.

He also knew that Pot rhymes with Hot cos he told me that even when I didn’t show him on the screen immediately after I put on ‘Hot’.

He knew that Goat rhymes with Boat. House goes with Mouse by replacing the ‘h’ with ‘m’ and Fox goes with Box! Everytime, we say the first, e.g. I say “House”, he will immediately say the other, “Mouse”. Thanks to reading the book, “Green Eggs and Ham” all the time.

So this is a summary of how Dar learns now. Through just reading aloud stories to him, letting him watch story videos and asking him interacting questions while reading. While reading, leave out an important word at the end of the sentence and let him do the voicing. He would be making a guess based on his ‘memory’ of the words but when he kept reading, he would remember what the word looked like and understood what it was, even in other books. This is pretty amazing to us as I didn’t intend to teach him reading words til after 3 years old..he did it all himself. I didn’t even realised just reading aloud is a method til I read Mem Fox’s book.

As a disclaimer, Dar learns this way because he’s naturally interested in alphabet letters and he’s interested because we had been reading to him daily since young and had books always lying around. Not all babies like books and not all children learn this way. Darius is just stronger in visual and auditory learning. He remembers very well things he saw or heard.

UPDATE(2ND SEP) (also posted for the Chinese Reading Post):

I had since analysed and found out that we had unconsciously started a learning process with him through all these reading for fun activities and it worked with him.

HIS LEARNING STYLE

We noticed he doesn’t learn by listening to us speaking to him, for both English and Chinese. He can’t hear words and understand it by that alone. We discovered a visual learning process with him and due to ‘forcing’ him to speak out, he grew more confident and was able to try to imitate our speech. At the same time, he remembered the words he had seen and thus was able to ‘read’ them.

SO WHAT IS THIS VISUAL LEARNING PROCESS?

It all started when Hubby was reading the book, ‘The Wocket in My Pocket’ when he was much younger. Since he was reading about Chair, Table and Sofa, he thought it would be fun to show him the objects while reading the words! I myself never thought of doing it as reading to me is just sitting on my lap and pointing out the graphics.

When he read the sentence, “I like the Zable on the Table”, he would tap on our coffee table and emphasized to Darius, “ta….ble”. Then he proceeded to say, “And the Ghair beneath the Chair.” He would tap his hands on the Darius’ little chair and emphasized, “cha…ir”. After a few times, Darius started finding it fun to get off his Daddy’s lap and tap on the objects himself while Daddy is reading! He would then sit back on his Daddy’s lap after doing these actions. The first ‘difficult’ word he started pronouncing accurately was “Chair”. We were very amazed. Then, he started saying table at other places too by figuring out that a table is a hard surface. He started tapping on his high chair table and tapping on the chair part he was sitting on, to say “chair”.

IN SUMMARY, THIS IS HOW HE LEARNED TO SPEAK, READ AND UNDERSTAND FOR MOST WORDS (there are a few words he learned by just hearing & action, sight or figured out with his phonics knowledge.)

1. Read to him a simple storybook with pictures, not too many text on a page and the text should be repetitive.(like Dr Suess’ Series and the Chinese Readers I’m using now)

2. Point to the pictures while reading or after reading the words for emphasis.

3. Show him the real object if possible or act out the action for him while speaking the word.

4. Read it to him constantly and if he starts following or imitating after our speech a little, start leaving out that particular word I want him to learn while reading. Usually it’s the last word or a word that is a noun or verb. Sight words that helps a sentence structure like 在，的 were just read by us and not emphasized til later when he had learnt all the ‘important’ words. Now he is still too young to understand such words as they could not be visualised and only memorised.

5. Start leaving more words out and even sight words so he can start to ‘read’ all the words one after another in the sentence confidently. In time, he would read them very smoothly at one go and start speaking sentences! (Not at this stage yet but progressing to it)

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