Fomentando la lectoescritura en inglés en casa

Fomentando la lectoescritura en inglés en casa, nuestro nuevo post donde te damos 5 ideas super chulas que implementar lectoescritura en inglés en casa, hoy mismo.

 

Fomentando la lectoescritura en inglés en casa

Si en el post anterior Claire nos daba todos sus consejos para fomentar la lectoescritura en inglés en clase, hoy Beatriz hace lo mismo pero dándonos mil ideas para casa.

No es la primera vez que nuestra compañera Beatriz escribe en Spanglish Easy; ya lo hizo hace unos meses con su post La cadena alimenticia, el rábano y la crianza bilingüe. Habla de la crianza bilingüe sin tapujos, de su punto de vista y de su experiencia, y sin dudar, esto hace que sus post tengan ese punto de vista tan cercano que como padres y madres en muchas situaciones necesitamos. Queremos saber que otras familias han pasado por lo mismo. Queremos saber que es posible.

 

 

Our biliteracy journey: Captive reading at home.

As Adam Beck states in his book Maximizes your child’s bilingual ability, captive reading seeks to put comprehensible text in front of a child’s eye to trigger that “automatic reading response” and thus increase daily language exposure. Once children have gained the skills to read the target language at a basic level, our challenge involves getting them to use this newfound ability.

Firstly, please allow me to give you some background regarding our biliteracy journey. I started working on phonics with my daughter when she was 4 years old (actually 4 and a half years old, sometimes we forget that 6 months can make a big difference for children under 6) through RWI methodology. By the time the Covid-19 outbreak hit us, she was already capable of decomposing words into phonics using dots and dashes, which helped her to pronounce the English sounds properly.

My daughter’s reading skills were improving day after day when I was around but, as a Psychologist, I was aware that the key for developing her full reading potential was to guide her motivation when I was not with her.

 

 

1st TAKEAWAY TIP: Meaningful learning is based on self-discovery.

Keeping the RWI flashcards handy for solving pronunciation queries became a problem as it involved looking for a specific flashcard among a big deck of cards, and I didn’t want to waste the self-driven motivation of labelling her stuff or reading by herself the RWI decodable books that she browsed sometimes. This is how I came up with this brilliant idea of setting a phonics poster on the toilet wall, in front of the loo. Why? Because children spend a ridiculous amount of time sitting on the loo, you know it, and I knew it too, so I seized the opportunity to have my daughter’s fine eyes on the wall of the toilet. And that was the beginning of our captive reading religion.

 

 

Next step was setting a reading corner. A reading corner at her fingertips and adapted to her reading level.

As you can see, our first reading mats were based on phonics sounds flashcards, phonics mini-books and decodable phonics books. And the subsequent mats were based on vocabulary linked to images depending on the calendar topics: Christmas, Halloween, Summer, Spring, back to school.

 

 

 

 

2nd TAKEAWAY TIP: Keep the material fresh and engaging

The blue mat is very useful since it offers the possibility of posting fresh material persistently, as per Adam Beck’s principles “The challenging part of captive reading isn’t posting the first text, it is posting texts persistently to keep the material fresh and continue engaging your children’s natural inclination to read.”

 

Jumping from sight words reading to sentences wasn’t easy though. The best thing about decodable books is that your kids can read sentences based on known phonics and sight words. My daughter preferred reading decodable books over other material, but after a while she started to feel it as homework, it wasn’t fun anymore. Her reading skills were read for the next level.

 

 

3rd TAKEAWAY TIP: Make it fun

Scavenger hunts are the perfect tool for keeping children reading until the end. Kids can get tired of reading a 3-page book, but they never feel this way when it comes to solving clues for a final reward.

 

 

One of the benefits of Games-based learning is that it boosts the self-confidence of children.  Developing emotional intelligence is a family goal that all parents bear always in mind.

When my daughter started school, I used to stick notes to the lid of her lunchbox. As she did not read yet, they were just smiling faces or heart shapes, just to cheer her up in case she felt lonely. When we began working with phonics, I started to stick some of the flashcards from the blue mat on her lunchbox`s lid, and it worked quite well so I went a step further and also tried to include riddles and jokes based on her interests.

 

 

 

4th TAKEAWAY TIP: All you need is (written) love.

Leaving love messages to your loved ones is not just an excellent way to strengthen bonds but also to foster a communicative style, and the most important thing, to encourage exchanging messages, which increases the chances of having your kids writing back.

 

 

 

The last piece of advice I am going to gift you is quite obvious, but important enough not to be overlooked.

 

5th TAKEAWAY TIP: Keep books at their fingertips.

Create a reading corner. Set a library (bookshelves) at your children’s height where the books are clearly visible. Don’t always have the same books, don’t overload the shelves, and change the books periodically.

 

 

Hope these tips can help you on your biliteracy journey as they have made a difference in both my child’s motivation and reading time.

 

 

 

Fomentando la lectoescritura en inglés en casa ha sido un posts escrito por Beatriz, la cual, comparte un montón de estos consejos y mil ideas más en su cuenta de Instagram. No dudes en seguirla y en inspirarte con las miles de actividades que comparte. Nosotras estamos enganchadas.