Developing your Child's Reading and Writing, part of a series of Positive Parenting workshops organized by Julia Gabriel Centre really helped solve the many doubts that I had and I appreciated the opportunity to be invited to attend it. Julia Gabriel and her wonderful, chirpy daughter-in-law, Aggie put Dw and my minds at ease with their various methods of engaging children and developing a literacy rich home environment. This is the start to building the foundation for reading and writing, something which will follow our children for their lifetime.
The no. 1 rule which was stressed to us at the onset was: We, as parents, have to be readers if we want our children to be readers! Totally true! Go take a look at Tom and Pippo Read a Story to know exactly what we are talking about. So, start reading! Newpapers, magazines, novels, they all work!
We were given time to role play. We took turns to read to each other, pretending the listener was our child. It was quite awkward initially, given that we had to constantly change our voice pitch to suit the mood of the book and had to be very expressive to gear to the tone that will retain the interest of the child. Apart from simply reading words, we should also give attention to the pictures in the book and elaborate on them. Afterall we are talking to little children and these pretty, colourful pictures are more than likely to catch their attention then just plain, black words which probably do not make much sense at their age!
We all know as well, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy... so yes, PLAY! Use our imagination and creativity to create fun games by taking the concepts from our favourite childhood games like Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly!
We all know as well, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy... so yes, PLAY! Use our imagination and creativity to create fun games by taking the concepts from our favourite childhood games like Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly!
A natural progression from reading is writing. We were shown the different tools used by Julia Gabriel Centre for their Pre-School education classes to help children of various age groups develop their writing skills. Finger paints, fat pencils, pencil grips, these were just a few of the many instruments introduced to us. Kids have it lucky these days, don't they! I certainly didn't have this luxury when I was in Pre-school!
I look forward to the time when he gets to N2 next year and goes on to the 2nd stage: emergent writing, which essentially means that he will be drawing pictures that depict a story. Something which Jill still enjoys doing now, at K2! She will draw and tell us why she drew the bees, the butterflies, the flowers and what were they doing prior to flying etc.
With these little steps, it will eventually lead to the 3rd stage in K2, whereby our children will then write for a reason. They write to tell a story on why recycling is important and what they do for recycling. They write recipes, how they bake cookies. They write grocery lists, they write rules of games they play. The list goes on, you get the idea...
I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the workshops, especially Critical Thinking on 24 Oct, which is an extremely important skill that will benefit our children in many aspects of their lives. Lifelong skills like effective analysing, reasoning, evaluating and creativity are all parts of Critical Thinking and are the building blocks for problem solving and communicating rational solutions. If any of you are keen, do contact Julia Gabriel Centre to find out more and you are definitely still in time to enjoy the 10% if you sign up for your 3rd workshop!
