A 'colourful' evening with Alicia - (teaching of colours)

My teaching philosophy for the very young learners is that learning has to be fun, and if you don't really read my blogposts regularly to find out how teaching is actually done, you might be easily misled to think that I'm stressing out my child by 'forcing' her to learn so many things.

Honestly, all learning so far is made fun for her and tailored to her preferences and activities always take place at a time when she's comfortable and happy to learn. 

On Saturday, I made a new set of learning aids for her to teach word recognition of the colours in both English and Mandarin. Since she already knows all the 12 colours I feature in my learning aid, she doesn't need to learn the concept of different colours and how to pronounce the words in English. 

The learning objectives thus are word-recognition for the English and Mandarin words for various colours and learning to pronounce the Mandarin words. :)

Of course, we don't start with all the colours for a single activity. I go through the cards with her and we start to pick out those she seems keen to learn more about and just focus on those few for that session.

It just so happened that while we were having fun with the word cards - it's really hilarious when she tries to speak Mandarin - she decided to bring her shape sorter over. That didn't spell the end of my activity with her; instead it added more fun! We matched the various coloured shapes to the right word card and the fact that she had a physical object she could handle made it more enjoyable.

Matching the object to the word card (here we focus only on Mandarin)

Subsequently, she got a little bored and started wandering off in search for something else to do. Taking her cue, we walked around the house and in the process, I found a batch of stickers we got from a goodie bag we received that day and it just so happened they were of the same colours as her shape sorter objects! She loves stickers so the next activity just appealed to her instantly.

The aim of the activity was for her to match the sticker to the shape according to the colour and in the process, I try to reinforce as much as possible the pronunciation of the word.

Busy peeling off the sticker

Here's the completed work

After she finished one round of matching, she decided that she'd just stick stickers all over her face... lol... and  I of course just let her go ahead. :)

The main thing about teaching toddlers and young pre-schoolers is to take their cue: when they want to end the activity, just let it go at that and try again when they want to learn again. That way, learning is fun for them rather than stifling.

My little one pasting stickers all over herself:

A blue one on the eye!

Something else for the other eye?

One on the cheek!

Simple Mandarin word cards

Last Saturday during Alicia's last lesson at Julia Gabriel, I had the opportunity to speak to her Mandarin teacher about teaching pedagogy.

I learnt that the learning aids I've been making for Alicia to teach English would also be useful in the teaching of Mandarin and they work on the same principle, just that Mandarin doesn't have alphabets like the English language and hence the approach would have to be thematic instead.

She also gave me the idea that I should just make simple word cards and stick them on familiar objects in the house to help with word recognition. She reinforced the fact that these don't have to be elaborate: just use a marker and some cardstock or vanguard sheet and that's sufficient since the object itself is present. 

I thought that was quite a good idea and since I had some really old vanguard sheets lying in the storeroom, I thought I'd put them to good use. Who cares if they're really old or stained with age? :P 

Here are the cards:

A very economical way to do simple teaching at home, don't you think? :) No need to laminate and go through all that hassle. Hee. Besides, all the printing I've been doing is taking a toll on the ink cartridges and of course, ahem, our pockets. :P

Back to the basics.

Now I just have to get down to sticking them around the house before I can bring Alicia on her daily 'gallery walk' to familiarise her with the words.

You can of course do the same for the teaching of the English language. :)

Have fun with this really budget-friendly idea!