it's paying off...

Early February this year, I was eager to teach Bryan some sight words. Timing wasn't really perfect. He was reading a little and then became lazy to practise anything at all.

I always subscribe to the belief that creating a learning rich environment will enable a person to learn subconsciously. This has always been so when I sprinkled important lines all over my classroom when I was teaching German, especially near the main entrance/exit. You see, students go through them so many times a day. It would not be long that they would put the foreign sounds to the foreign words.

Anyway, I thought I could do the same with my kids too. All my passive learning aids were up in the hope that my kids would absorb something without me actively teaching them, e.g. the alphabet wall frieze, the posters, the sight word charts etc. After 9 months, I think it's paying off:

Bryan was using the alphabet wall frieze yesterday to spell his name and his friends' names yesterday.

Then he surprised me when he read out the whole of the "Where" and "my" sight word chart!

He couldn't have remembered from his memory coz:

1) It was about 9 months ago that I even uttered those sounds to him.

2) He was correcting himself as he read. The first two questions begin with "Where is", while the next three are "Where are". When he was at question no. 3, he was reading "Where is" initially and then self-corrected to "Er, no, it's Where are". And when it came to differentiating socks from shoes, I begin to believe that he's making connections with the little phonics that he learnt from Ms Julie's class last year. The words "shoes" was initially read with "s" sound. And then he self-corrected again when he saw the aitch and went "sh-oes".

He's definitely making the connections. How exactly, I don't really know. This reminds very much of the"litte black box" aka the Language Acquisition Device as proposed by Chomsky.

Till now I still haven't figured out how to teach him phonics, blending sounds. I tried using onsets/rimes, but he still has a long way to go when it comes to segmenting words into syllables. Honestly, I don't have the diligence to do work on something with him systematically every day.

But I'm definitely pleased that he's reading without any active effort of teaching on my part!