During the past months the FunLab team has had to become expert on teaching remotely. NOT AN EASY TASK. One approach that we have used is to make short videos that the children can watch from home. The downfall to these videos is that if the kids get bored they won’t watch them. Making English fun is a little bit of work. That is why I call these videos creative learning. I have had to get really CREATIVE to keep the kid’s attention! The other afternoon we experimented with using to use salt dough letters to spell out a word. We started with an easy CVC word: SIT. The first step is to make the letters that you need to spell the word. We had just finished the first JOLLY PHONICS book and made all the letters in it S,A,T,I,P,N but to keep this video short we just used S, I and T. After we finished forming the letters together we put them in the correct order and read the word. SO MUCH FUN! Remember that if you are teaching English as a second language to small children it can help to have an image of the word that you are reading nearby. That way they child directly associates meaning to the written word without passing through the native language to translate.
We know that kids have been home for a while and homeschooling is not easy for everyone. This could be a great way to do some CREATIVE LEARNING! Try other words besides sit. Once the kids get the hang of it they can combine the letters themselves to discover different words that they can read. Watch the video to see how we did it.
Tryout out our suggestion for Creative Learning: let’s read SIT using salt dough letters at home! Let us know how it works. If you would like other suggestions for creative learning look at our archive! Here is a post that also combines creativity and learning.
have fun!
Alison
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