Teaching toddlers at home methods/systems

Krithika - As another book-lover I dont think you can ever have too many books or give a child too many. SO in my biased opinion i would say that no you dont need to stop and you are definitely not spoiling him. I do the same , can never resist buying one more book and at this rate Aadhu will have more books than toys or clothes! We just got a new bookcase last week to hold our growing collection I too bought the Dr Seuss ABC last month (Aunt Annie's alligator....) as well as The cat in the hat. We already have One fish two fish - I love them all! If you want to add to your collection, I bought this one too and love it (from landmark) and plan to buy more from the series soon. We dont do any of the franchise/brand stuff in our house either.

Vanathi.

 

We are also book lovers and the only place my 5 year throws a fit is a book shop. He for a 5 yr old has varied interests and though I have a goo collection of general kid books, we seem to be getting more books on the Solar system, any thing and everything to do about the earth, the stars, the sky - minerals, fossils, gem stones etc. He is in that phase of learning now and most of them seem like adul books but for now he reads the explanation below the pictures and seems happy. As far as the kids books are concerned, we are big fans of Eric Carl and almost have all of his books. He now loves to read these books to his little sister who will be two next month!

So no, you are not alone and we are all there as your partners and the other thing is when my sons pre school teacher came for a home visit before his school began 2 years ago, she was a little surpirsed to see so many books but a couple of months after school started, she sent in a note saying "Now I know why you have so many books and where your child is learning from". So I feel encouraged to get more - ofcourse sometimes, I get cheap and buy them second hand/on sale. And finally my son watches me read and his question once a week is when will I read big book slike you by myself - makes me feel good.

Oops, came in to say, we are like you but ended up giving my life story

 

Question for you Srama (Krithi - sorry to hijack this thread) - when did your DS start reading? How much teaching did you do and how?

Vanathi.

 

I love books, but my LO is not as much into them as I would like him to :-( I still try, and get books from the library every week. DS seems to be an audio-visual person, like his daddy (not too much into books either). But he is starting to read! The other day we were at the library and I was picking up a book titled "The Polite Elephant", and he goes "Amma, Police Elephant Book...". I was impressed. Yippee!!!

Vanathi, I think P started to read about 4-5 months back. He could read the names of all his classmates (they have little marked cubbies where they can keep their blankie etc). He can also read names of his fav TV show characters, plus common words like apple, cat, dog etc, and some colors.

 

Thats fantastic Sindhu! He's only 3 right? So how did you teach him or did he learn at daycare?

Vanathi.

 

The link I gave wasnt for Tulika (is that what you were referring to?) but I do love their books even though being soft cover they get crushed so easily. But they make a good starting point for Tamil/bilingual reading.

V.

 

Vanithi/Krithika,

sorry about the delay in responding...it's been crazy as usual. BUt here is what I have been doing.

yes he is a little early in reading. Has been doing it for a couple of years now. I have not used any specific techiniques but followed the cues given by him. You are right in not specifically following any TV characters. I have realised that the less fictional the characters, the more he could relate to. So intially it was all about baby animals, fruits, vegetables - these kind of books helped me teach him colors, numbers, shapes etc and it was easier to show them when I took him shopping and he could relate straight away. We would read the names on fruits again - he would pick up the names by looking at the fruits and began reading them soon. The other thing that has helped me teach him learn is internet - I am sure there are varied views on this but the exposure to him was limited to googling for known words again fruits animals etc and show it to him. By the time he was 3, he was typing to look up what he wanted - this is how he learnt to spell (always under supervision). THe other thing that helped me was bill boards and water towers. The alphabet charts with pictures helped teach association.

You have to realise, I was very unconventional - I didnot teach him phonetic learning, he is doing that in school now but has no probelms and the only downside I have seen is he has not developed an American accent but speaks with Indian accent. So I all I did was just followed what he wanted. Most of our story telling has been made up stories by us - the realistic ones like how we see shapes in clouds, how we can fly in a plane from place to place etc. Reading from children's books seemed to make him feel lost - I observed this a couple of times and so switched to my own stories and then introduced simple books like "Jay, Jay the jet plane" etc. This helped with his imagination and it actually got him interested in the sky, solar systems and the cloud systems. But honestly all I did was speak to him in realistic terms, not in baby terms, expose to reading wherever there was an opportunity other than just through books and lo by the time he was 3 1/2, he was both reading and writing. Now at 5 he is enjoying the children books at school and thinks they are actually funny and brings books he likes from the school library to read to his sister. He watched Dora quite often, but was not interested in the same books, none of the cartoon characters took his fancy - I don't know why. But some children might learn better through these characters I am sure.

Just an incident that makes me proud but never shared here - he wrote a little book on solar system when he was 3.5 at school and that got published in a book that his school principal was writing Paid quite a bit of money and got the book for my collection.

So as you can see, I just was conscious and very aware of his learning desire/ability and he led the way and I followed him. I think that is what works the best - identify an area of interest and make progress there.
I hope it threw some light as all I could do was tell you what I did.

Happy reading with your little ones. Enjoy.