Home teaching updates

Its been a while since I update about Ting Ting home teaching. I have been very busy recently about the happenings at home and many other things. Therefore its been a long time I had my structured classroom sessions with my gal. So now, as things seems to be settled, I can concentrate in my home teaching again. 

Today I happened to chance upon some preschool workbooks which are what I have in mind to go through with my gal. Initially I was thinking to do up the worksheets by myself but that would be very time consuming. These workbooks I come across are practice workbooks about alphabets, phonetics, numbers and simple math and calculation. I felt they are very simple to understand and down to earth too. So I bought 8 books at $20. Not exactly dirt cheap but save me the time and effort to do it myself. 

Currently my gal is attending a playgroup of 2 hrs daily on weekdays. What I like about the playgroup is its structured learning approach. For instance, they will focus one week on teaching colours and another week on shapes and so on. Although my gal already know all these (colours, shapes, numbers, weather, alphabets A to Z), but the focus approach of teaching helps to reinforce her understanding which I felt is very good in building a solid foundation for her as she progress. 

However, I felt that it is time to expose her to more themes while she is having her foundation to be reinforce in the playgroup. I hope when she goes to nursery 2 and kindergarten, it will be easier for her to pick up and hence reducing the need for supplementary lessons so she can have more time to play and have fun. 

I observed that my gal has no problem in learning language particularly english. However, she is quite slow in numbers and not conversant in mandarin yet. 

These are the areas I need to buck up with her. Ironically, maths and Chinese subjects are my forte especially Chinese and I always thrive in my grades for subjects relating to numbers previously. Anyway, I decided to take things one at a time. 

My strategy is as follows: 

1) English

Focus on building her foundation in english first. Particularly phonetics, word recognition and writing. 

2) Numbers and Math

- Exposing her to 1-50 numbers and gradually to 100. 

- numbers recogition and understanding,

- practice writing of numbers

- simple addition and subtraction. 

3) Chinese language

- Work on her chinese words pronounication, 

- source for easy to understand mandarin workbooks for practice writing simple chinese characters (so far I have not come across such workbooks yet. The ones I saw are quite complex for her age).

- words recognition and understanding

- source for interesting mandarin teaching videos

- borrow more chinese books for her daily reading

Workbooks new collections. 

Although some workbooks are labelled for K1 but after flipping through the contents, it seems suitable for her age too. Anyway I just try out and evaluate the results as we progress.