The Long Road to Literacy

I have been postponing teaching Ko the letters till she was about 2 years old as I was still feeling the remnants of the exasperation with Imm when I was teaching him reading. But I realised I better get started. Also, she does not show much interest in letters in the beginning unlike for Imm. She enjoys singing and catches on easily in singing both Eng and Chinese songs but runs away when she sees letters. Maybe because I started to act like an anxious kiasu Sinaporean Shichida ex teacher filled with anxiety that it started to rub off on her, even though I always tell myself to chill. Anyway, my motto in teaching is always to have fun. Only when Imm had chicken pox and is stuck in Spore, I started to spend more time to teach her. Maybe that's how it is with the second kid. Always having remnants of the time, energy etc. 

I started doing these alphabet cubes sometime ago. They are used from the Happy Meal Macdonald Boxes. As I mentioned from another post eons ago, they have other uses (from another game). I love these. Each letter will correspond to each picture and we will try to throw it together. Sometimes, Ko will go "vvvvv" (sound) witch!" which makes me collapse on the floor with my hands in the air or she will give a gleeful "ffff" tiger! And we start to redo our alphabet dice again.

One thing I did lately was to think of a simple game like these. Found these magnetic paper in my stash. They are bought from daiso and I finally have some use for it. What is good for these paper is that they can be printed directly on it. But I didn't as I wanted my alphabets to be mixed up. 

I printed these alphabets from http://pdf.mrprintables.com/mrpac02-lc.pdf and cut them out before pasting them with derision onto each B5 piece. For each card, there are letters with sounds she already knew, thus it would not look absolutely foreign to her. Also, I made sure not to put "b" and "p" together for less confusion,

I cut out some shapes from magnetic paper as I was planning to play this game on the magnetic board. I then "hid" each letter behind the shape. I will ask her in Chinese, "who is hiding behind the red triangle?" And she will remove that particular shape. Then I will say the letter sound. I did it in an extreme high pitch voice of excitement to stir interest. What surprised me was that she enjoyed it so much that she wanted to play all of the cards. Which was good. :)

I printed out these worksheets from www.overthebigmoon.com and used our do-a- dot markers to play to emphasize the letter I wanted her to learn that day.

I found out recently that she enjoyed tracing and could follow dotted lines these days.