Here is one of the great advantages of becoming a teacher of English to children: one day a few of your own pop out into the world and very quickly they reach an age where you can start using all of your favourite materials and activities to help them learn at home!
Our son Jamie turned four in June (just gone), and for the past 7-8 months I've been very gently introducing him to alphabet and basic phonics activities, to provide some "bottom up" style learning activities to supplement the already impressive amount of storybook reading we do together. In the past 2-3 months, he's really taken to it and comes to me daily asking for more "alphabet games" to do together.
We do a variety of ongoing things together, to maintain variety and to appeal to different kinds of "doing" for him.
We're working on a big alphabet strip that goes right across our living room wall, around the television (and will eventually snake its way around the entire room!). This consists of simple A-4 size pictures of letters, each surrounded by a variety of pictures that utilize that letter to make its initial sound:
While Jamie colours these in, we chat about the different pictures and practice saying them together. Even at this very early stage, I'm trying to give him exposure to the idea that some letters can make different sounds (hence 'A' has ant, apple, astronaut - but also apron, arm and alarm; and 'G' has girl, gate, ghost - but also gem, giraffe, and gym).
He loves this ongoing mural and comes to me every day asking for a new letter to work on (frankly, sometimes I struggle to keep up with the demand!). The colouring in is good for developing his motor skills, and the very casual chat about the words appears to be very effective "peripheral" exposure to words, letters and intial sounds.
We've also been working with basic phonics worksheets from my Phonics Starter Series. You can see a video of Jamie when he was three, working with the initial (and very basic) motor skills activities on the front page of the English Raven website (down toward the bottom, underneath the gorgeous video of him when he was two, reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar to his parents!).
But we're also starting to get into initial sound variations for different sets of words. The following videos are an excellent example of how quickly children can develop and progress with these sorts of activities.
In this video, Jamie is a little uncertain about what's supposed to happen on paper, so he wants Dad to do it. I show him how to "build" the letter F as a big and small letter, using different strokes, and then we work through a series of pictures to see which of them begin with the "f" sound. He's uncertain at times, not least because I've deliberately scattered some words in there that start with "v" or "b" - but mainly he's just coming to terms with this whole idea of sounding out words and linking an initial sound to an alphabet letter.
You might also notice that the selection of words includes vocabulary items from previous worksheets we've already completed (starting with "e"), to help recycle and review words and alphabet letters.
This video is from a couple of days later, and we're now up to the letters "I" and "J". If you watch/listen carefully, you may notice that Jamie still wants me to sound out the words for him, but he is making much more confident decisions about initial sounds for words, linking them to the target alphabet letter, and he has decided by now that he wants to do the crossing out or circling on the worksheet. As you will see in the video that follows next, all this scaffolding and modelling from Dad is important, as it creates a platform for him to start doing these sorts of activities according to patterns and routines independently.
Here you can see that Jamie is not only doing most of the activity himself, now he is expanding it and adding things he knows from previous applications or other kinds of exposure to the alphabet. In addition to sounding out words and using the initial sound to decide whether a word starts with 'O' or not, he also wants to state what sounds and letters the other words in the grid start with. In fact, he even recognizes (finding a 'P' word in the 'O' section of the worksheet) that some words will feature in the next grid, knowing that 'P' follows 'O'.
Anyway, if you've watched those three videos in sequence, you can no doubt see how things are progressing and developing quickly for the little lad!
It is a true delight to sit down and help your children learn this way. My wife was gobsmacked when she saw what Jamie was capable of doing by the third video there, and asked me how in heck I managed to get him to that stage so quickly. I reminded her that I made these worksheets for classes of 12 children aged 4-6 in small classrooms in Korea, and that helping Jamie 1-1 in this way was a piece of cake by comparison! But really, it comes down to a calm and progressive method, appropriate scaffolding supported within familiar routines, and basically letting the child decide when and how they want to take the next step.
I also reminded my wife that she had recommended (during the activity in the first video above) that I ask Jamie to do more of it on his own, and challenge him more (my wife is Korean, and Korean mums do tend to have a pretty demanding nature about them when it comes to education!). By the third video my wife was starting to see the bigger picture (plus some hints about why Jamie doesn't seem to be taking all that well to her attempts to keep developing his Korean...). Not fair, really - having a husband who has spent more than 15,000 hours in classrooms with young learners! I think it also infuriates her when she asks me "what level/grade do you think he's at now?", and I always answer "He's at Jamie's level - his grade, whatever he decides that is today."
In any case, I'm certainly no super expert in early childhood education, nor in phonics instruction, but the time and activities Jamie and I are engaged in here have nothing but positives going for them. I think it's really important that it is him coming to me wanting to do this rather than vice-versa, and we always skip whatever he doesn't want to do or stop as soon as he finds it boring. He's still a very young lad and all...
Here is a snapshot of the different worksheets Jamie and I are currently working on in Phonics Starter 2 from my website:
By the way, the best worksheets and activities I've seen for this sort of thing are over on Abc Teach, a fantastic resource website for teaching young children (my phonics stuff is a good starting point, but Sandy - the maker of Abc Teach - is the genuine expert). I'm planning on becoming a member of that site very soon, and drawing on a ton of great resources to help Jamie with his learning at home!
:-)
