My oldest daughter is in second grade local Chinese school and has English classes. The focus is on rote memorization and spelling.
I discovered yesterday going over homework vocabulary lists that China Bambina doesn’t have the basics down, and is getting frustrated guessing. Basics like A, As, An, And, At are not all there. I don’t care what she has to learn for her grades, but I do want her not to be frustrated, and to get the basic building blocks wired and work her way up. It’s crazy to do more advanced spelling if the basics aren’t right.
China Bambina can make sentences out of every word, and use the words properly. Tenses and plurals are not perfect but seem pretty reasonable for a 7 year old that speaks English as a second language.
I found something called the Dolch Word list. Anyone familiar with that? Seems like a reasonable core of basic words to get figured out. Any thoughts on the Dolch words?
Started making and doing flash cards with China bambina. Flashcards work for me at least, and the repetition is good. The words that she “knows” then go to low review frequency, and the ones she doesn’t know are focused on. Of course, can have rewards and games to go with it. But unless I come up with something better, it will be flashcards at home.
Anyone have any thoughts on spelling? Keep in mind China Bambina’s primary language and school language are Chinese. She writes hundreds if not a thousand characters now, and knows the romanization system. But English spelling is a challenge.
We have a similar issue; my eldest son is the same age as your daughter and they are Dutch/English bilingual. My son’s reading and spelling in both languages is affected and the problem is of course vowels. Because Dutch is almost perfectly phonically regular – the letter “a” always means the same sound unlike in english. So when he approaches a word he does not know, he comes at the vowel with a sort of generic schwa noise and hopes he can work it out from context.
The Dolch sight words are high frequency words and also words which cannot be sounded out easily because of the peculiarities of english. They can increase confidence and ease of reading and in that way are useful. There are a lot of resources on the web to vary your activities with sight words – bingo games and word searches and other fun stuff. Flash cards can get old when you are seven.
Word walls can be very helpful and fun as can daily things such as making shopping lists or writing cards for relations and friends stateside.
I have had the most success on targeted learning with a website called edhelper.com, it requires that you pay to subscribe but has some free stuff to look at. Its most useful feature is that you can search for various levels – second grade, first two months, for example – and get activities targeted to that level. There is also enchantedlearning.com but it is more for enrichment activities than targeted learning exercises. Iknowthat.com is fun and free but their approach is more phonics based than sight words based.
My daughter is pretty big in doing the word searches. I made up one with site words from somewhere on line that has helped her out.
What has helped the most is reading together. She does a page, I do a page.
Another thing to remember is that pretty much ALL 7 year olds, native speakers included, are horrible at spelling. Spelling in English is a challenging and difficult task. Many well-spoken adults never manage it with any consistency*. This is why some smart people invented spellcheck.
Does she read any age-appropriate English language books?
*Note: it took me 3 tries to spell “consistency” correctly, I kept wanting there to be another “t” in there somewhere.
We like a book called Phonics Pathways which will teach a lot of spelling along the way. It’s meant to be used either to teach reading or for older kids to learn phonics/spelling they didn’t get the first time.
I think that would help the most (depends on the kid, of course.) Most of my knowledge of English as a written language–spelling, grammar, proper usage, and so on–came more from lots and lots of reading and not much time in class. (Several years of German helped too.) Eventually you just learn what looks right even if you don’t have a formal class. That doesn’t solve everything or teach everything but it can be a good start.
I don’t know what Chinese children’s literature is like, but there is a ton of great English children’s lit (as I’m sure you know.) She can read it in the original English (or you can read it to her in English as she reads along–I used to do that a lot with my parents at about that age.)
Thanks everyone! My sister in law is a ASL teacher and mother of 4, so she’s given me some pointers too. SIL also confirmed that Dolch words are pretty much the core of any American spelling program.
I’ve spoken English with China Bambina since she was born. We are doing Chinese only at home right now to help out the youngest twin, who has challenges with talking (trying not to overwhelm her with multiple languages until she gets 1 going). That said, China Bambina’s spoken English is pretty decent for it being her second of 3 languages. She’s mastered the Chinese pin yin romanization system, which is alphabetical, but is a set group of regular sounds. Eg, memorize how the 60 sounds are spelled, and you’re done. Not like English with done, dun, dunne. Chinese only has verb tense modifiers with no exceptions (you would say verb + past tense modifier. That past tense modifier is standard and works with every verb). And of course she writes in pictograms instead of an alphabet system.
China Bambina made up about 30 flash cards already, and already some of the “guesstimate” words like “an” she now knows how to spell. So, I think the flash cards are going to work out pretty well for her. She makes the flash cards, we drill together and she will drill alone.
Chinese school workload is just waaaaaay too much. She’s got to learn so much of the Chinese curriculeum that there’s not much time for fun games, plain old reading, playing, computer word games, etc.
Word Wall seems like a good idea. China Bambina is a very creative artist and loves to do any kind of art. So making flash cards, a word wall type activities are great.
is her problem with “knowing how to write a word she can pronounce,” with “knowing how to pronounce a word she sees written” or with both? Both are a ***** in English…
With the first, writing, writing, writing. Making the flashcards, or writing down (get a blackboard or similar device, my grandma had, a portable grey one where you wrote with a stylus and we loved it) short sentences she’s made up. “You know how to say it, do you know how to write it?”
With the second, reading, reading, reading out loud.