How do parents create opportunities for your child to talk?

A child's oral language skills are best indicator of how well they will develop literacy skills in the future. Oral language is the foundation for all literacy. Before your child learns to read and write they must have first developed strong oral language skills.

There are 2 types of oral language skills:

• Receptive (Listening)
• Expressive (Speaking)

World Leading Literacy Expert Marie Clay (2000) considered that a child's literacy education began with listening and speaking, then moved to reading and writing. In general, talkative children who have a wide vocabulary become successful readers and writers.

So, how do parents create opportunities for your child to talk?

There are a wide variety of settings:

• Home
• School
• Social gathering
• Enrichment classes
• On your way to school (driving/walking)
• Outings (parks, gardens)

Topics to cover

• The view (eg vibrant flowers, the swaying trees). Outings in a park.
• The feelings (dog-tired, on cloud nine). On the way home back from school

Role Play

• Magic show. Ask him to put up a magic show and explain the steps involved (plenty of magic books in the library)
• Cooking. Pretend that he is a cooking teacher and explain how to cook (recipe book comes in handy)
• Broadcaster. Give him a simple newspaper article and a toy microphone

Chinese is not Difficult

Some parents had been asking me to share how to teach Chinese. So here is my way:

I believe that children should not learn how to write if they are below 5. So, from the time Wen is three, I have only been teaching him to read.

Chinese is a beautiful language especially the Chinese characters. Each word is like a picture. There are a lot of meanings behind each word. When we teach Chinese to kids, we should introduce the word using flashcards. Wen learnt the words by memorizing the whole word like a picture. I started with 3 flashcards each day and increase gradually. When he was in P1, it was 15 flashcards per day. For words he could not remember, I have to introduce the cards to him again until he remembered.

A good material to use will be the 四五快读 books from China. It is a series of 7 books which you can get from Popular Bookshop or from sprees. There are flashcards at the back of each book. 

Test is good!

Many psychologists have reported that recalling information on a memory test can strengthen future memory for that information ( Roediger & Karpicke, 2006a; Wheeler & Roediger, 1992). It is often found that tests strengthen memory even more than do extra opportunities to study the material. (Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education 2008)

This is when the thick past year popular school test/exam papers come in handy. However, do this only after your child has covered the specific topics. I will normally ask Wen to do the SA1 papers during the June school holidays and SA2 during the December holidays.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” - Louis L'Amour (1908 to 1988)

Most parents encourage children to read but not writing as writing is a really tedious job. One of the ways to encourage writing is to let them to take part in essay writing competition. It is the experience that counts – the children will feel important. NLB and several organisations do organise essay writing competition annually.

Book review is also a good way to encourage children to write. Discovereads.sg by NLB allows children to register an account and any book reviews done will be awarded with points and badges. What an awesome rewarding system! Below is one done by Wen in June:

Don’t be too quick to correct their grammar or sentence structure as too many corrections will put them off. Let them copy certain section from the book to build up their vocabulary.

Assessment books and past years exam papers for parents-coaching

Past year exam papers

This is very useful to assess your child’s standard and the results can be used as your teaching plan.

Assessment books.

Not any assessment books. Focus on those that he is weak in or areas you want him to excel.

Here are some the assessment books I used

English

The Write Way by Marshall Cavendish 

Chinese

阶梯作文by Marshall Cavendish 

Maths

Get Me Thinking Math by Visibile Maths

Visible Thinking by Marshall Cavendish 

Essential Problem Solving by On Sponge

Read A Lot but no improvement in composition

Most of my friends told me that despite their children’s vast interest in reading all kinds of books, there are no improvements in essay writings.

I consulted my friend, Serene, whose daughter managed to score 268 in her PSLE without any external tuition from Primary 1 to 6. What is her secret in getting her daughter to write ?

“Don’t follow model compositions,” that is her advice.  Wow! That is something different. As you know, most tuition centres will teach their students by asking the students to copy model composition and memorize them.

So, what should be the right approach?

·        Use the writing mindmap (the 5W and 1H – Who, What,                   Where, Why, When and How)

 ·        Checklist for a good essay: 

·        Tenses 

·        Spelling

·        Punctuation 

·        Paragraphing 

·        Wide range of vocabulary (similes, metaphors etc)
                                                       

·        Overall – Realistic storyline, missing links

What are similes and metaphors?

Replacement of common words

Encourage the children to be more descriptive and precise in their composition. Instead of flower, use rose. Instead of bird, use pigeon. If you can replace said with whispered, uttered, declared or revealed, why not use them?

Tips for scoring well in reading comprehension tests

Tense

This is the most common type of mistake made by students. Train your child to use the correct tense by giving the following type of question: "What did John eat for lunch?"

Answer

There are two parts to checking the answer.

1) Did the child lift an answer?

An answer is considered to have been lifted if it was copied and pasted word to word with no change at all. Unless the question requires a sentence or phrase to be given, please avoid lifting an answer.

2) Did the child answer the question?

Students need to check whether they have crafted their answers such that they had answered the question.

For example, same question as point 1 above. The answer should be "John had noodles for lunch." and not "John's mother cooked noodles for John.”

Punctuation

Omission of full stop, commas and missing upper cases are common. These are easy to rectify as long as the child is careful.

Spelling

Ask your child to spend a few minutes checking through the spellings before the work is passed up.

Infer 

To infer is to understand unstated ideas using logic. Inference is a vital skill for the Reading and Listening sections. However, you must be careful not to infer too much. Any inference must be supported by the passage.