Whether your homeschooling or your child is about to start going to school, making learning fun is paramount to their language development. It’s difficult for parents to know exactly what kind of techniques work and those that will produce lackluster results because every child is different. It’s best to broaden your ability to teach your child than to pick and choose techniques at random. Realizing that your child will need to be taught differently to how you would like to learn something is so crucial. In essence, you must put yourself into the mind of a child to understand their attention span, approach to words and sentences, etc.
Morning storytime
If and when you have the time, you should be reading your child bedtime stories. Above the age of 1 all the way up to 5 years old, the child’s brain is going to develop the quickest. This is the right moment to inject some knowledge and interest in the learning of language. However, what about morning stories too? When your child is eating his or her breakfast, read a short 5-minute book to them. Sit beside them and allow their eyes to match visuals to words to give them meaning. When children can attribute words and sounds to something they can see, the lesson will resonate deeper in their psyche. Just before they go off to daycare, reading a short story would elevate their imagination and therefore kickstart their brain into absorbing new information before you drop them off.
Making sense of it
During the toddler phase, children are rapidly growing their vocabulary and ability to create proper sentences. This is wonderful to see firsthand because they’re learning to express themselves, which means they’re also developing a personality. To help your child develop their internal dictionary, use this random word generator to play a game of ‘wordsmith’. You can decide how many words you want to generate at random, how long or short they will be and in four different languages. It’s a great way to practice playing scrabble but for children, it’s a simple but fun task to find real worlds from a random assembling of letters. It will train their eye to form patterns and words where there seems to be a jumbled mess. It’s both cognitively interesting and will test their ability to make sense out of something that appears confusing.
Learning a new language
You might not be bi-lingual but your child certain can be. It’s the right time to teach your child a second language as it will become second nature to their mind very rapidly. Hiring a personal tutor would be the best option as hands-on teaching is the best way to learn. Your child can also ask questions for problems they find difficult. English is the language of the world, but it would be beneficial to learn Japanese, Spanish, French or German as these are also dominant languages throughout the world.
Bedtime stories are great fun, but morning storytime should be introduced to ignite your child’s imagination and willingness to learn something new for the day.