Babel School in Taiwan

Równo cztery lata temu Ania zaczynała się uczyć znaków transkrypcji języka chińskiego używanej na Tajwanie. Transkrypcja ta to 37 znaków i cztery znaczniki tonów. W mowie potocznej nazywa się ją bopomofo (od czterech pierwszych znaków). Oficjalna nazwa to zhuyin fuhao 注音符號, czyli zapis fonetyczny. 

Ucząc Anię liter równolegle wprowadzałam małe i duże litery. A jak to robiłam można pocztać w poprzednich wpisach (w większości po angielsku): From the very beginning I was simultaneously teaching Ania lower and upper case letters. You can read about it in my previous posts: - Literki z naklejek-kółeczek - Sticker letters   - Księga alfabetu - Alphabet book - Bingo literowe - Letter bingo - Zabawa w dopasowywanie liter - Matching letters game Po tym jak Ania poznała wszystkie litery, zarówno małe jak i duże, by utrwalić obie formy zaczęłyśmy używać pomocniczych materiałów językowych. Jeden z nich to gra memo z postaciami z filmów Disney'a. My jednak nie bawiłyśmy się w memo, a w zwykłe dopasowywanie małej i dużej litery i układanie ich w kolejności alfabetycznej. After Ania learned all the letters, both lower and upper case, we started using some language materials where both letter cases are used. One of them is a memory game with Disney chara...

Już kilka razy w grupie Dwujęzyczność dziecięca na Facebook'u padło pytanie jak nauczyć dzieci czytać w kilku językach. Od czego w ogóle zacząć? Którego afabetu uczyć najpierw? Czy uczyć kursywy, czy nie? Czy najpierw litery drukowane czy pisane? Chciałabym podzielić się moimi doświadczeniami w nauczaniu czytanie i pisania po polsku, angielsku i chińsku. Zaznaczam - nie jestem żadną specjalistką, nie znam żadnych badań naukowych na ten temat. To co chcę opisać, to moje prywatne doświadczenia zebrane w czasie nauczania trójki moich dzieci. Każde dziecko jest inne, każde uczy się w innym tempie i nie każdemu będzie odpowiadać dany sposób nauki. Nawet wśród mojej trójki nie ma żadnego pobobieństwa, dlatego do nauki każdego miałam indywidualne podejście. Postaram się jednak wszystko zebrać razem i jakoś ujednolicić. Zaczynamy naukę liter. Większość liter fonetycznie wymawia się tak samo i po polsku i po angielsku (aaa-b-d-eee-f itd.). Od tych liter zawsze zaczynam. Nie uczę naz...

It's been a while since I've last had to make language materials for kids. I thought that I won't need to do that anymore as I already have so many materials, but ... I was wrong. It turned out that after countless moves and years of not being used some of the materials disappeared and are nowhere to be found.  To help Ania learn how to read I made the so called CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) word lists . Each list contains three to eight 3-letter rhyming words (ending with the same two letters). Altogether there are 26 lists. Please note that some words are from British English. You can download all the lists HERE . How to use these cards? You can use them in a few ways: to teach reading - you read the word first and the child repeats the child reads by himself all the words on the list the child can make the same words using moveable alphabet or other letters (for example: printed or written on pieces of paper) for copy work - the child...

How about a round of Bingo with your preschooler? After Ania learned all the letters (both upper and lowercase) I pulled out one of the old language materials I made for my older kids - a special Letter Bingo.  How to make one? It's easy! On A5 size sheets print grids of different sets of letters - all mixed up, lower and uppercase, some letters can appear more than once.  Print one set of alphabet in lowercase and another set in uppercase. The letters can be made to fit the size of each grid on the card. Cut black construction paper into little squares the size of each grid. Laminate the Bingo cards and the letters (remember to laminate the letters before cutting them). Before presenting Ania with whole alphabet Bingo game, I played with her an easier version - with only a few letters. The letters to choose were also much bigger. Bingo cards, letters and small cards (in the box) Ready to play! How to play? Pick a letter and say the 'l...

Some time ago I came across a really nice floor puzzle - Alphabet Train Puzzle. Ania liked the puzzle right from the start, but beacause she was not familiar with the order of the letters in the alphabet it was taking her a lot of time to complete it and sometimes she would loose interest half way through. After she has learned most of the letters it became much easier for Ania to put all the pieces together. After a while I added "an extention" to this simple put-the-puzzle-together game. Ania was suppose to match the letter cards to the letters on the train. The puzzle not only helped Ania in learning the order of the letters in the alphabet, but it also helped her to learn the names of the animals on the puzzle. As you can see it's not that difficult to turn a simple game (or in this case a puzzle) into a teaching material. :-)

Continuing with teaching letters to preschooler - putting it all together. After finishing all the exercises for a particular letter I would give Ania a box of cut out letters from magazines (small and capital, all in different fonts) and ask her to look for that letter. Next step was to glue these letter to the big sheet of paper together with the letters from other exercises. And now time for ... stickers! Out of a box of stickers and a sticker book we chose the ones which pictures begin with the letter Ania is learning. After Ania placed them on the page I wrote the names of the objects. It looked like this: After all this work Ania's letter page was finished! And after a few months all the letters had their pages and it was time to put them all together  into a big alphabet book: Ania had lots of fun doing all the letter exercises and she is very proud of her big alphabet book. Although she already knows all her lette...

Another fun activity through which the child learns the letter formation is writing in sand. You can prepare a simple sand tray for practicing writing. I took a plastic lid from a chocolate box and filled it with some clean sand (just enough to cover the bottom). When the child uses his finger to write letters in sand, his whole arm is moving. He is getting the feel of the roundness or straightness of the shape of the letter. When the child is just beginning to learn to write letters he can see the letter that he wrote and compare it to the one that he is looking at. Later on this exercise can be used to check if the child remembers how to write a certain letter (instead of writing with pen/pencil on paper). That is what I am doing with Ania:

Ania LOVES coloring and drawing. So another great way for her to practice her letters was to color them! I printed a whole set of color-by-number letters from the Reading-with-Kids website. And then whenever I was teaching Ania a new letter she would color one too. I let her choose if she wanted to color with crayons, colored pencils or markers. My older kids would never be interested in this exercise as they never liked coloring. So if your child does not enjoy coloring, don't push them - learning is supposed to be fun :-)

Time for another fun way to introduce letters to the little ones. This time kids can play with paints. They can either use their fingers or a paintbrush to write the letters or words. In the beginning I asked Ania to trace the letters I have written. Later she wanted to write by herself.