It's probably obvious, but one thing that works well with teaching students any concept is to vary up the method of delivery. The more you can approach the same concept from multiple angles, the more engaged the students will be, and engagement translates to focus and mastery. This is true in teaching anything.
I try to use this in working with my son at home, as well. After he went back to daycare, I continued to work on Chinese with him everyday. I find that it helps both me and him to have a variety of ideas for review, so here are some that we use:
We are now up to 70 learned characters, and he really does recognize them all! It's very exciting. I know that he still needs to ramp up on different fonts, but I feel like that is easier to teach than teaching a character from scratch? Our daily practice has also made a difference in his pronunciation and oral vocabulary. I look forward to him being able to independently read simple Chinese books some day!
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Regularly, there are questions posed in the bilingual parenting group (of which I am a member) about how to encourage your child to speak more Chinese back to you. L's Chinese production ebbs and flows, but I have been on a re-booted effort to actively encourage his speaking recently and have had a lot of success. Today, I adhoc recorded a casual, unscripted lunch-time conversation with him. In this conversation, you can hear that although he still naturally slides into English conversationally, I keep gently nudging him to come back to speaking Chinese by offering sentence-starters that mirror what he has just said in Chinese. He is encouraged then to repeat himself in Chinese. I try to do this in every conversation I have with him, and I have noticed it making a big difference. (At first he did feel frustrated sometimes, because he didn't have all the words, but I try to not criticize his phrasing or pronunciation and to model what can be said in that situation, and over time it has gotten easier for him to switch between the two languages.)
Here is the link to our (imperfect, unscripted) conversation if you are curious what that sounds like. I hope this offers some ideas to another parent out there! |
About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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