Ashton has been attending full-time school since he was 20 months and he is now 40 months so he has already been 'studying' for 20 months! Not counting the early development program at Kindermusik, JG and GUG. All this while, we have been outsourcing the teaching of our children to external vendors but lately while accompanying Ashley in her GUG class, I just felt like these are things that she could probably learn better if I am the teacher. That is, if I have the time and patience to teach.
From Ashton's school report, he was supposed to know all his alphabets and numbers counting from 1 to 20. One day, we decided to test him and you can imagine how dumbfounded we were when we found that his recall of the alphabets were in a mess. Perhaps, the school was teaching him in small caps, I thought?? BUT, its the same, still a mess! His ability to recall was haphazard, sometimes he knows, sometimes he doesn't and once that happened, his attention will move on to something else.
This became a serious matter for Papa and I. Papa said this is basic stuff, if he can't even get this right at 3 years old, how is he going to learn words and so forth. We decided that a daily drill is necessary now. It has never been a practice for us to drill the children as we do not quite believe in this type of learning, much prefer to expose them to various things and for them to learn through the experiences or things that they see and touch. But, desperate times call for desperate measures! While Ashton is relatively bright and possess strong ability to corelate, he doesn't have the patience to learn. We need to find a way to get to him. Papa started teaching an alphabet a day, starting from the letter "A". We will ask him to look for the letter A from anything that he can find from the surrounding, could be as simple as things like lift lobby "A". Mummy complements the teaching by thinking of how he can relate those alphabets to things that he likes or knows.
Did we learn anything from this episode? Sure, we did. It was an important realization that WE are the parents and the responsibility of teaching them lies with us, not the school or anyone else. Its a long journey of continuously teaching and guiding our children.
As a HR person, I believe in using tools to equip employees to do their job well. So, while at Growing Fun to get the junior engineer stuff today, I bought this alphabet teaching tool. We already have many teaching aid on alphabets at home, but this is pretty interesting. Firstly, it comes in small caps (GUG believes in teaching small caps first), then the jigsaw puzzle wood panel allows the child to fit in the alphabets into the correct sequence. Next there are some words that require the child to place the alphabet to complete the missing letter. Hopefully, Ashton will like it.
Hi Carol,
ReplyDeleteChanced upon your blog. I fully agree with you that it is the role of us parents to coach our kids. Schools n enrichment centres may be able to impart knowledge but I think the teaching and one to one attention that I parent can give is invaluable. It is not easy coaching your kids as a FTWM of 2 kids, thus I think u are doing a great job thus far.
Btw realised that Ashton is about the same age as my son Kyle.