Korean Job Discussion Forums

[OiGirl]

Based on your education, experience, or intuition, when should you start teaching young learners (say, 5 Western age) to read and write in English? Why?

In reality, at what point have you been required/forced/asked to teach them to read and write?

[the saint]

I've been required to teach them as young as 3 and from my experience learning this the hard way, I would start them reading and writing as young as possible using a top down approach.

What this means is using stories, full texts and trying to get them into the shapes of the words. There are a whole load of activities you can do with kids who are as young as 3 or 4 with this approach to reading if you have word cards made up for the words in the stories that you are doing.

You should use very simple but fun and repetitive stories with the same kind of phrase on each page. The Hungry Caterpillar is one example. If you can get hold of the Oxford Reading/Story Tree books you are made for life. They are fantastic.

Activities you can do with kids this young and a good book or two include:

Place all the word cards on the floor for a story they know well. Show them the page from a simple story book and have them find the words on the page from the words on the floor.

Play "concentration" with simple words so they get used to matching the shapes of the words.

Use words that they can instantly relate to i.e. names of characters they know well, their own names, concrete nouns that appear in the story. Avoid abstract concepts in general but two or three letter abstract words may be fine e.g. the, and, prepositions, he, she etc

Fold an A4 sheet into quarters. Ask the children to draw something from the story or the flashcards in each quarter. Exchange sheets and then their partners have to find the word that corresponds to the often difficult to figure out picture and write it in each square. If this is too tough because their drawing skills lack something, write a word in each quarter yourself and the kids have to draw the corresponding picture.

Copy a picture from a book with words of nouns and characters around the edge and have them draw lines to match the word and images in teh picture. As a prompt have some flashcards with the images and a word on the back in another part of the classroom so that they can go over there and check. Don't let them bring the flashcard back though. Let them have the necessity of storing the word in their mind and carrying it back to their worksheet. That way, you are encouraging long-term memory acquisition of the sight-word.

Use sound effects for vocab items they know in the story e.g. the sound of pages on a book being flicked or a book being shut for book and they find the picture of the item and match it to a word. For characters you can do different voices.

For writing, have them do a lot of copying activities starting with tracing and moving on to actually copying the word themselves. An example would be a worksheet where you have a picture of a book on one side and then in grey the words "bag dog cook book Dad" on the right. The kids have to trace the right word to match the picture using the story book or flashcard as a reference if they need to.

I could go on but you get the idea of a top-down approach from this I hope. Get into stories as deeply as possible. Not a whole range of them but just a few that you can really pull apart in detail. I have been blown away by how quickly kids as young as 4 or 5 will sight read words in English simply through a lot of exposure to them through context based stories.