Singapore’s Child

Singapore’s Child is the leading early education publication here in Singapore. It is distributed to all the centres for the parents of young children and teachers to read. Of course it is a great help for the parents and teachers in understanding their children as it is a very informative magazine.

I received my August copy already. My centre same with the other centres give it to parents and teachers free of charge. Though it costs S$3.50 per copy. Not bad for such a nice magazine about early childhood education.

An article about learning how to be proficient in spelling caught my eyes for it reminded me of my second daughter who was so good in spelling during her early years. At the age of four she can read and spell words with four or more letters already. She was able to read and spell three letter words at the age of three and started reading at that age. Though I may say heredity can be a factor in her case, I consider her environment which I provided as the primary factor in her acquired skills. Since she was sorrounded with books and other learning tools like educational toys, and with my guidance too, she became so interested in the printed words. With her interest in the printed words, it was then easy for her to learn how to read and came with this are the vocabulary and comprehension skills she so acquired in the process. That is why up to now, she still is so hooked on reading books.

And so if you wish to develop language literacy on your children including how to spell correctly, I recommend that you provide a lot of children books to them. And you can also try this memorising strategy as recommended by Katherine Louise Koh who wrote the article for the Singapore Child:

The LOOK-THINK-COVER-WRITE-CHECK method can help a child remember the correct spelling of a word. Teach your child to:
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LOOK at the word carefully, and determine whether it can be broken into parts. For example, “absolute” can be broken down to”ab-so-lute”.

Learning in parts, and then stringing the parts together is often easier than trying to memorise the spelling of an entire word in one go.
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THINK about the images that can be used in association with the word, or parts of the word.

Make mental notes about the words that may be challenging, such as those with double letters, or those that are not spelt as they are pronounced.
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COVER the word. Keeping your eyes closed, try to visualise the word in the mind’s eye. Try “finger writing”- pretend to write the word using the finger.
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WRITE the word down without referring to it’s spelling .
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CHECK to see if the spelling is correct. If not, look at the word carefully, repeat the process and try again.

Happy spelling sessions with your children!!

ENTRY FROM: Teacher Luchie http://luchie.pinayexpat.com