The Bub in the Belly

"If you want to know someone, take a look at their bookshelf".

Do you ascribe to that theory? I think there is some truth in that. Definitely, when it comes to the bookshelves in our home, you can see our past and our present, and perhaps even our future.

Our bookshelves have a little of everything and a lot of some things. A bit of this, a bit of that, a whole lot of other things. Hopefully, you'll think that we're well rounded people with varied interests and tastes, a love of design and beautiful things, people who are curious about the world, people who are always learning, and people whom you'll like to sit next to for some illuminating dinner conversation. Or you could take the view that we are scattered, unfocused and full of nonsense. Heh heh.

Our home learning routine is constantly evolving, so what may have been the case a few months or weeks ago, may no longer be the case today. This is an update on our present routine.

As you would have read from past posts, we did quite a lot of travelling in April, and during that time, we took a break from home learning activities. In fact, we went on a break even before that, because of various reasons. Nevertheless, when I say that we took a break from home learning, I don't mean that we did nothing. It's not possible to do nothing - Ryan is constantly on the go, looking for something to do.

So what has he been up to? Well, Ryan has been spending a lot of time perfecting his reading, spelling, writing, alphabet recognition and phonetic skills. He even picked up the ASL (American Sign Language) for the alphabet after watching a Youtube video a couple of times. In fact, he loves surfing Youtube for videos on phonics. (We monitor his surfing quite closely, he is usually on our laps or right next to us when he is on the iPad.)

We play spelling games all the time. For example, when we're talking to each other - I might tell him the food is hot - and he will spell out the word HOT. When we're at home and he has his mobile letters with him, I will call out words for him to spell, like "Happy Birthday" or "Shining Star" or "Great Job" and he'll use his mobile letters to spell them out. We also use various types of spelling "toys", like the one which I shared on the blog in February (we've since finished all the cards). Here's a new video of him using it.

Apart from the activities related to reading, we are generally doing less of the left brain stuff and focusing on the right brain stuff instead. So we do ESP games, eye training, dots programme, memory games, etc. That actually takes up very little time -  maybe about 15 minutes per day.

We still do a lot of art-related activities, which can be as simple as playing with stickers or more elaborate painting on the easel. There're still a lot of musical activities going on - dancing, singing and playing with toy instruments.

Ryan enjoys a lot of free and unstructured play - eg. pretend play with play dough, free play with blocks, pretend play with toy cars and soft toys, building with Lego, etc. Ryan loves to construct intricate and elaborate structures like the one on the left in the photo below. You can also see in the photo that Ryan has moved on to the blocks on the right - this was immediately after he put in the last piece in the massive structure.:

Ryan makes a new track design EVERY night, without fail.

Here he is playing with stickers, after finishing the construction of the little structure on the table.

I don't know if you noticed the difference but there IS a difference from our last update - we've reverted to our initial approach of "not teaching". This was always our philosophy, right from the start and it worked amazingly well. Only this year, I came up with a small list of things I wanted to teach Ryan because I felt that he was getting bored and that he was ready for more structured teaching. So we spent February and March teaching him various things. He soaked it all up.

In April, as I mentioned above, we took a break and I took the time to review our routine. Ryan was doing really well but I was not really happy with the routine. I wasn't comfortable with it. I knew without a doubt that we needed to revert to our initial philosophy of "not teaching". And so we did. And that's where we are now. Still as busy as ever, but with a different mindset. I'll elaborate in a separate post what I mean by our philosophy of "not teaching", although you can probably guess already.

One thing never changed though, which is that we always let Ryan decide whether to do the activity or not. This was true even when we were "teaching" Ryan stuff in February and March, and it will always be our mantra.

Here's a Youtube video (about 3 minutes long) of Ryan reading.



I want to highlight a few very important points here.

Firstly, we did not use these cards to teach Ryan how to read. These are Letterland word cards that are used to play rhyming games ("pen" rhymes with "ten"). Ryan already knew how to read when we bought these cards.

Second and more generally, I do not want to give anyone the impression that we use flashcards to teach reading. We do not. We do not believe that flashcards is the right way to teach reading (plus it is against Shichida principles to use flashcards to teach reading). You can see that I am not flashing the cards at all in the video and I am not trying to teach Ryan anything as I go through the cards. I am moving at Ryan's speed (not at flashing speed) and I am not saying a word. It is not a flashcard exercise at all. I am merely letting Ryan practice his reading. It would have been the same if I had printed all the words out on one sheet of paper.

Third, we are not using the sight word method (like, for example, the Glenn Doman reading method or "Your Baby Can Read" method). No doubt there are some words that Ryan has to read by sight but not in this set of word cards. As I mentioned above, these are Letterland word cards used for rhyming - there are no sight words in the set. In general, and as I have posted before, we do not use the sight word method, which is memory-based. Where the word can be decoded using phonics principles, we want Ryan to do that. We do not want Ryan to "recognise" a word - we want him to learn the skill of reading/decoding the word. (As an aside, I should say that, after reading up extensively on Glenn Doman, we disagree with and do not believe in the Glenn Doman method, which is almost completely opposite to the Shichida Method. I'll write more on that in a separate post.)

Fourth, as you can see from the video, Ryan does read phonetically. When stumped he will go back to first principles, ie. break the word down into letter sounds. This is obvious at 1:53 when I showed him "Firefighter Fred". He starts with the letter sound for "F' and, after decoding "red" in his head, blends the two together, thus decoding the word "Fred" correctly. Another sign that he reads phonetically and not from memory is, sometimes he gets stumped on a word which he has read without problem previously. He just decodes it again. For example, on previous occasions, he read "Firefighter Fred" without any problem but this time, he got stumped. Reading being a skill, he gets better at it with practice, ie. he can decode the word faster with practice.

Lastly, we do not use the Letterland method. Ryan does not know the characters "Firefighter Fred" or "Harry Hat Man" or "Quarrelsome Queen". There are pictures of these characters on the flip side of the cards, but we never look at them.

The purpose of the video is to record Ryan's speed and accuracy with very simple words at this stage. He is already reading more "complicated" words now (not as quickly as he can read the simple words in the video). We are happy to note that Ryan's reading ability has rocketed over the last few months. We do attribute this flight to the fact that we did not use the sight word method or the flashcard method at all to teach him reading (not forgetting our regular story reading time of course).

Here's a Youtube video (2:14 minutes) of Ryan playing with something we bought last Sunday, basically spelling words to match pictures.



Ryan is taking his time to spell as he is a little preoccupied with handling the material (this is the very first time he is playing with this). You can also see how tidy he is, making sure that the letters fit nicely on the spaces. I got a little impatient (because I know he knows the spelling for these words) so I tried to prompt him but I misled him by prompting with the wrong letter sound! He was spelling the word "CLOCK" (at 1:30) and he said "L". I wanted to repeat after him, but somehow I said "/e/" instead of "L", so he picked up the letter "E". Just goes to show that sometimes trying to help is not helpful!

Ryan can pretty much read all the words in the set, if I spell them out for him. The question is whether he can spell the words himself. Spelling is a different thought process from reading so even if you can read a word, you may not be able to spell it. For the picture sheet that you see in the video, Ryan is very familiar with the spelling for those words, but there are more advanced sheets in the set, which he may not know how to spell out, so we will be working through them slowly.

This set was pretty cheap - about $10 from Popular Bookstore. If you're interested in this sort of game, there are lots around and we have a few different versions at home. You can consider Boggle Jr. - Ryan has been playing Boggle Jr. at his nanny's place, which is similar - it also lets him form words to match picture cards (or word cards).

Here's Ryan, 8 days before his 3rd birthday, reading BOB books from Scholastic. You can hear how precise he is with his pronunciation, enunciating the letter sound at the end of each word clearly.

After Ryan learned the letter names and the letter sounds, he started blending the letter sounds to read simple words. To be honest, we did not expect him to start doing that until he was much older. He really surprised us when he showed us that he could.

Here, I'll share some of the items we have around the house that relate to blending. I would also say that, if your child is not familiar with the letter names and the letter sounds, please don't bother him with blending. He's not going to understand it, he's not going to enjoy it and he's just going to be stressed out and turned off.

I should also say that we don't sit down with Ryan and go through words with him. It happens spontaneously and naturally throughout the day while we are doing other activities. We don't have any structured lessons or anything like that.

Ok, the best thing to do is of course to talk, read and sing to your child as much as possible, to let him familiarise himself with the different sounds in words. I can't emphasise this enough - this is the best thing you can do and the thing that you should do.

Off and on we will sound out a word for him - for example, if we see a dog, we will talk about the dog, what it's doing, what sound it makes, whether it looks like our dog at home, etc. We will sound out the word "DOG" for him - /d/, /o/, /g/ and then we will blend the sounds for him. We do it both orally and also with written words when we see words in the carpark, at the supermarket, on the way to the playground, etc. We seldom do it while reading a story as it can be disruptive.

Sometimes Ryan will say a letter or a letter sound and I will build on that. So if he says "/b/!", I might say, "/b/ for ...?" He might say ball, then I might ask, "Yes, /b/ for ball! Any other /b/ words?" Then we'll go on and on for as long as he's interested.

We have "mobile" letters everywhere - alphabet biscuits, alphabet blocks, alphabet stickers, etc. All can be used to put words together. We also have a set of giant upper and lower case alphabet stamps.

It was only when Ryan started voicing the letter names that we found out that he knew them. Before that, we never tested him - for example, we never asked him to point to the letter "A" or anything like that. When we knew that he knew the letter names, we then gave him materials to reinforce his letter recognition. I'll share these materials in this post. 

These are the items that we used. I am by no means suggesting that everyone must use these items and I am not suggesting that you should not use other items. Neither am I suggesting that you must do things the way we did. There is no magic formula. How you teach your child and what you use is entirely up to you and your child, your preferences and your circumstances.

Ok, again, I stress that Ryan had already learned all the letter names by this time, ie. we did not use these as our first tools to teach letter names. Having said that, we didn't draw a line between these "stages", we still continued to use the items in yesterday's post and we still have most of them out on the shelves for Ryan to play with even now.

First up, the iPhone app. We only had one app when it came to letter names, which was "Fish School" by Duck Duck Moose. This is a fantastic award-winning app which introduces letters, numbers, colours and shapes. I'm sure most parents on the iPhone will have this. Ryan played the alphabet song over and over and over and over again on this app. We installed it when Ryan was about 16 or 18 months, can't recall exactly. Ryan didn't really get into the app until a few months later actually, because we did not give him much time with the iPhone until he was about two years old.

We don't have any apps on the iPad for letter names (we do have some for letter sounds, but that's for a separate post).

We have many many many alphabet stickers - flat ones, foam ones, puffy ones, glittery ones, even those used for scrapbooking. Ryan uses them freely in his artwork; he will select each one, call its name and place it wherever he chooses. Stickers can seem a little wasteful so I always try to stock up when I come across very cheap stickers.