I had mentioned this series of books in several of my posts. Finally had the time to write a few posts on it. Beware… with my tendency to explain theories and how we do it..This post is going to be looong and detailed! ^_~

For the ease of reading the title, I translated them but they are actually a series of Chinese Progressive Reader Storybooks called, ‘学前阅读计划’ published by Odonata Publishing Sdn Bhd (google their name for the url). I bought them in January this year with the aid of Hubby’s colleague in Malaysia by directly ordering online and delivering them to his house.

WHERE ELSE TO GET THEM?

• Popular Bookstores in Malaysia – While waiting for my order to arrive, we went to City Square and discovered that the series was sold there in the Popular Bookstores.

While I was doing homelearning with Darius, we were reading mostly the Dolphin Media books, books borrowed from the library or a few miscellaneous books for Chinese Learning. It was not easy to find chinese books that were simple enough for him to concentrate. Simple ones were often too simple too with only one or two sentences and not enjoyable to read a-loud to him. Yet, those with short stories in them, Darius was not interested. Though I bought this series then, I only read to him occasionally as I was focusing on English storybooks. When he started CC in March, there wasn’t time to do much homelearning activities and we just stopped reading Chinese books.

Recently, he started speaking English words and reading a lot of them. When I talked to him in Mandarin, expecting him to follow me and pronouncing the words, he preferred to tell me the English version of the word instead. Like “衣服”，he would not say “Yi fu”, he would say “Shirt!” That frustrated me a lot. Even when he attempted to speak in Mandarin, he spoke in very ang-mo-ish tone, very weird.

I started thinking, “Oh no! What happened? Have I been reading too much English storybooks with him that he have no interest in Chinese anymore?”

I started the search for chinese storybooks suitable for him to read and methods on how to teach Chinese but it wasn’t easy. There wasn’t suitable ones I knew he would like for his age (less than 2 years old).

Finally on the 28th of July (recorded here in Snippets #13), I remembered these books still on my bookshelf and took them out to read during dinner time while I was feeding him. I was guilty of not reading more chinese books to him so I thought to just do it for fun and not ‘waste’ them. Usually I would be singing songs, reading English storybooks or Peter and Jane to him while feeding him so it was easy to just switch and dedicate the time to learning Chinese instead. It was a hit! Since then, it had become a routine and had been so for a month now! He would request to read it every time during his dinner.

HIS LEARNING STYLE

So why do I need books to get him to speak Chinese? Can’t I just speak to him?

That’s THE problem! We noticed he doesn’t learn very well by listening to us speaking to him, for both English and Chinese. He couldn’t understand just by hearing. The reason why he’s speaking up more now is because we discovered a visual learning process with him and due to ‘forcing’ him to speak out, he grew more confident and is able to try to imitate our speech more now. Maybe it’s also because his language world is expanding at the age of 2 and he naturally started speaking more. But we believe he would not know as many words if we didn’t get him through this process.

SO WHAT IS THIS VISUAL LEARNING PROCESS?

After he started learning more words this way through a combined effort of visual, motion and intentional pointing at the words, I realised he didn’t just do reading of words alone and gradually knew the words. Probably some words were learnt just from sight since we couldn’t find the real object or act out all the words but there’s actually other steps we did too.

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 LEARNS TO SPEAK, UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE AND READ FOR MOST OF THE WORDS. (there are some words he learned by just hearing & action 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)

I recorded his ‘reading’ of three books recently as a remembrance of it. Might be recording more when he had made significant progress.

I stress that I’m not trying to groom him into a reader of words by a certain age nor trying to show off how smart he is. All this is really a record of our daily activities to get him to speak out more. He just doesn’t speak much nor say things we could understand unless he reads!

And our efforts had paid off because he started saying some of the words even when he wasn’t reading!  He would say them suddenly or say it when I do the action or show him the object. This is what I meant by teaching him to speak using books. I had been telling him like forever that ball means, ‘球’. I mean, we actually speak Mandarin to each other and him at home most of the time! We play ball and tell him to pass the ball but he doesn’t get what ‘球’ is. Other children usually gets it but him? ONLY after I started reading this Chinese Reader books!  As for how he learnt the word ‘ball’, it’s the first word he uttered from reading Peter and Jane books with him. (see my post, ” TotSchool- 17th Week” under Planned Activities). That’s how he learns.

Here’s his video recording of Reading Book 1 – 拍球 on the 17th of August, two weeks ago. We had since progressed to reading Book 3 which I would show in “Reading ‘Preschool Chinese Readers’ With Darius – Book 2 & 3″

For the purpose of this recording, I’m asking him to specially read out words that he knows already in several sentences. But usually, I’ll just read over the words he already knows and get him to pronounce more of the words he is unsure of, by waiting for him or asking him questions.

It didn’t happened overnight! Below are the Details of his Progress from no interest, zero Knowledge to knowing certain words in about 3 weeks.

1. When we first started reading this book at the end of July, he kept saying “Ball!”, “BALL!!!”, no matter how many times, I read to him “球”. He didn’t know how to say and refused to imitate me to say the word. The beautiful graphics and the nice layout of the words on one page and picture on the other kept his interest though. These type of storybooks always catches his interest.

2. Excerpt from the Snippets #13 post: He recognised “大” from another source since May. So I was trying to get him to pronounce “小”. He could only manage to say “ssss…..”.. “ao”. He doesn’t know how to say “笑” too but when we read it for a second time, he was able to say, “haha’. Cos I was going “hahaha” after I read the word. He remembered that. And he knew “拍” means tapping on something as he would demonstrate it while I read that word.

3. After reading everything for a few days to him, he started saying after me, “明明”, “丽丽”(he pronounced as ‘di di’). I started leaving out these two words for him to read aloud and he gained more confidence.

4. The second week, he started pronouncing “Pai拍”, and I left it out for him to read on certain pages. Then subsequently, he finally stopped shouting “Ball! Ball!” to get me to acknowledge his knowledge of the word ‘ball’. Instead, he started saying, “球” (qiu) very softly. It was GREAT progress and I was really happy about it.

5. Finally, he learnt how to say “笑了” (he says it as “xiao…wer” in the right tone) but when there’s only ‘笑’ in a sentence, he still tend to say “xiao…wer”.
Most of his pronounciations are still very English sounding with no differentiation in tones but I’m still glad he had since learnt that 拍 means to hit, 球 is ball, 明明 is a guy’s name, 丽丽 is a girl’s name, 笑 means to laugh “hahaha” and 小 is not the same as 笑 though they are both ‘xiao’.

6. We followed all the steps in helping him to remember better. Step number 2-  Pointing to the pictures after pointing to the word to learn.
Step number 3- Showed him in action, 拍球 by hitting the ball and saying  the two words again and again. Hubby used the Lego figurines he loves to play with to pretend that the boy is 明明 and the girl is 丽丽. If he laughs, I quickly say, Darius 笑了！

7. Step number 4 – leave out words he roughly knows to get him to speak out more confidently. All important words learnt thus far.

8. Step number 5- Start to leave out more and more words in a sentence. (still in progress)

Up Next: ‘Reading Book 2′, ‘Reading Book 3′

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