Life long sharing . . .

Another reason why I stopped the reading center is:

I have a different stand on learning vocab via flash cards from the franchiser. The franchiser’s program stressed on learning words (word card) without any pictures. Yes, there is a good reason for that as some kids they tend to memorised the picture and not the word (especially for English). Very frequent we get input from parents that the kid can say the word out  (read) correctly when presented the word with the picture. But when the parents cover the pictures, the kid is not able to read the word.

But then, we see another problem (especially in BM), the kids can read so fluently, but at the end, they will tell you “I don’t know” when asked what is the story about.

And I remember when Ling was doing one worksheet, where she was asked to draw a picture for the word given, she came to me and said, “Mum, can you help me draw dotted line for ‘wig’? You know, the pretend hair. I want two side long one.” I taught Ling this word showing her a picture of ‘wig’ like this:



It triggered me to think that, yes, like Professor Shichida mentioned before, our brain stores words/vocab as picture. When you are given a word, e.g.”Eiffel Tower”, the image in your brain is showing the picture of the tower. I still remember the question being asked in the class “Who see the letters ‘E-I-F-F-E-L T-O-W-E-R’ in their mind instead, please raise your hand?” None in the class did.

So, normally when buying flash cards or making flash cards, I use Shichida Methods, one page picture, one page word. Start showing the child pictures first. Let them know what the thing called. Then subsequently picture-then-word, or word-then-picture, and eventually, words only.

Sometimes I play games with them using these cards. For English, putting all the cards with pictures facing down. Then I call out a word, they have to find the correct cards. For BM, words facing down.