It builds character. If thats not allowed, men really are just sperm donations and bank accounts. Equality please, no more sexism. Bruises are good, when not intentional
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Relax, heâs the kid in that video.
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Letting kids eat shit and grow from their experiences as per your GIF pic. Didnt realize i was being subtle.
I only speak English to my kids and never speak Chinese in front of them (unfortunately, a side effect of this is that my Chinese (never strong to begin with) has really gone downhill.
I read to them constantly and encouraged them to read and look at books from an early age. We made sure there were a lot of English books in the house and encouraged them to look at them.
Iâm a big reader as well so they would see me reading a lot and I tried to instill a love of reading in them or at least a love of books when they were younger.
I tried to talk to them as much as I could in English and insisted that if I was speaking to them in English, my wife would not translate what I said into Chinese. I wanted them to learn to think in English as much as possible.
As they got older, we continued to encourage them to read and made movies an English thing (which meant we mainly watched them at home instead of going to the movie theatre). I also had them practice reading out loud to me. We would read a short story (only five or six pages long) and we would take turns reading one page each. The child who was not reading, had to listen and then explain what is happening in the story (my kids actually got better at this than my wife). Weâve gotten out of this as school and my work takes up a lot of time but Iâd like to get back into it.
I also bought them English workbooks (they used to have them in Costco but we got ours from Canada since I wanted a Canadian focus instead of American) and they would have to do a unit a week.
I also got them into board games (my son more than my daughter but I make her play). We started off with easy games but got into more complicated games as they got older. The games are all in English and require reading to play. For example, theyâd have to pick a card and read it to figure out what to do. His favourite games right now are Scythe, Fallout, and Terraforming Mars.
My kids are now 10 and 12 and their English is quite good. They love reading, so I bought them ebook readers and filled them up with English books. They probably read English at least an hour or more a day during the week and even more on the weekendsâwe actually have to tell them to put the books down and do something else for a while.
As long as you expose your kids to English, take the time to read to them and speak to them in English, they will be fine. You should also look for activities that you can do in English.
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Opposite situation here, living in UK and my wife only speaks Mandarin to kids. Everyone else only English. Oldest child is 6 and fully bilingual, youngest tends to mix in more English when speaking Mandarin but still doing fine - although both will tend to speak English to each other nowadays. One difference is that my wife isnât working so has had plenty of time to teach them, she has also put a lot of time and effort into teaching our eldest to read and write.
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Gonna have to tap out now haha. I dont really get random gifs without some indicators. Still think i was being quite blunt, aka not subtle.
Welcome back @gmcgough600
Yep, it definitely helps when one parent can full-time teach the kids in the language that is not a part of the country in which they are currently living.
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No worries. Hereâs a TED talk that backs up what I was saying about the little ones and their language acquisition: Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies | TED Talk
Certainly, as you get older, consumption of media is key to second language acquisition. But Sesame Street isnât going to do much good until age 2-3 if youâre not also speaking English in the home.
Never push them to learn English. It will only make them resent everything about it. Make English a normal part of their life that they need to go about their day and theyâll be driven to learn on their own. Keep a great selection of age and developmentally appropriate books around the home. Sit with them and read with them daily, reading books about things they love. If that means they want you to read the same book nightly for two months, so be it. Just make sure they see reading (English) as something to want to do, never something that their parents force them to do, especially as they get older. Demonstrate your own love of English reading by sitting down with books or playing audiobooks (even if you donât love to read, make them see you reading). Monkey see, monkey do. Seriously, children are always imitating their parents. You want them to do something, you show them how by doing it yourself.
Also, donât reward your children for completing books or doing âhomeworkâ that you give them. It makes reading about pleasing the parents and not about reading because thatâs something that we do to learn more about whatever weâre interested in. Rewards are a great way to make sure they demand more and more things for something they should do anyway. They donât work on children who are already driven to do the thing anyway.
Extrinsic motivation can be almost as valuable as intrinsic motivation. How many doctors would there be if the only reward was helping others and learning?
Weâll have to agree to disagree.
Besides, after a while, they wonât care about the rewards once they become hooked on reading in my personal experience.
I should also add that push doesnât mean force. Push means work to have them reading above level ASAP. Kids, especially young kids, rise to expectations.
Weâll def have to agree to disagree about a few things. Itâs true no one is 100% intrinsically motivated to do some things, but for child development, I believe in it.
In my experience as a teacher of too many years, rewards (and punishments for that matter) do very little to drive/push against a certain behavior. I tried doing rewards systems and, in the end, the kids who would have done the work get points and the kids who didnât want to do the work donât work harder to get the prize. Practice, on the other hand, works wonders. Make reading fun (someone said board games that involve reading) and the reward is âI get to play a fun gameâ. Or get them books about things they already love and they will flip through them without any prompting because they want to absorb the content on their own. Youâre suggesting giving them rewards until they see reading as a rewarding experience, Iâm saying make reading a rewarding experience and they wonât need any outside rewards.
It works the other way too. Kid doing something they shouldnât? Practice the behavior that they should do. Running in the hallway? âI think we need to practice how to walk in the hallway. Come along, letâs practice walkingâ. After they waste time being stopped and shown âhow to walkâ, they arenât going to be as willing to run past you the next time. It takes time, but itâs waaayy more effective than yelling at them.
Motivating your kids to want to read above level is one thing; pushing them to read above level is a surefire way to make them give up. Tiger parenting is why I hate teaching in this country â few kids have any interest in anything because mom and dad made sure they hated everything with their âpushing beyond developmentally appropriate by age 6â. Reading at level is fine. What third grader wants to read YA novels anyway? (Ans: one who is already head buried in a book 24/7 because itâs something they already love to do)
Iâm not disagreeing with you overall.
I was lucky because my two oldest accepted the âencouragementâ and became self-motivated and diligent students. The younger two were born five and six years later, so they grew up seeing the older two involved in their studies and mostly took to it themselves.
But for my kids, rewards worked very well, and they never tried to take advantage of the system.
Research shows it is best to tie the language to the person, ie one parent, one language when talking to the child. Rather than one language at home, one outside. If the same parent switches language depending on being at home or outside, that can confuse language learning. Small children are constantly constructing language rules in their brains.
Also, if your partnerâs English is only average, speaking English could in fact be a negative. It would be better if he/she kept to Mandarin.
Is there actual research that shows that? I thought it was just a theory.
We chose the one language at home, the other language outside option any it worked fine.
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Source?
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Assuming English is the language at home. Do you speak Mandarin outside? Or vise versa?
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When your Mandarin is below average, your partnerâs option is limited.
My daughter had me with her for nearly all of her first 3 years before she started kiddy school. I donât speak any Chinese. Just keep the child exposed to English. Talk all the time. Explain everything you do - All of your actions.
I had super simple songs and other tunes playing all the time. I sang her rock and roll songs as they played on the stereo. Iâve been reading to her since the beginning. We read every day. Sheâs 7 now and fluent in both English and Chinese. She reads both very well but is slightly behind her peers in the USA for reading.
If you speak Chinese donât let you young child know about it. My friend from France speaks fluent Chinese and his daughter, same age as mine, wonât speak any French.
Peppa Pig, Robo Car Poli, Dinosaur Train, etc⌠were very very powerful learning tools. Baby could see and hear how the characters would interact with each other. She could hear all of the different expressions of the characters. Really good good stuff.
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