My son, Anson, is three-year-old this year and is the start of the learning process.
As a parent, I noticed that my son learns faster when he can associate pictures with spoken words faster than the other way round. Also, my son is rather playful and can spend endless hours running around the house, instead of sitting down to start learning.
As such, I bought a few set of alphabet blocks for him to touch and feel the alphabet instead of just seeing it in 2D on a piece of paper.
As a father, I had pre-conceived ideas on how to teach Anson on how to recognise ABCs. When Anson started playing with them, I had to throw out of my brain and let my son create his own way of playing. In the process, it was a learning process for me as a father too.
Anson "zhng" his favourite toy car!
As a parent, I noticed that my son learns faster when he can associate pictures with spoken words faster than the other way round. Also, my son is rather playful and can spend endless hours running around the house, instead of sitting down to start learning.
As such, I bought a few set of alphabet blocks for him to touch and feel the alphabet instead of just seeing it in 2D on a piece of paper.
Alphabet Blocks
As a father, I had pre-conceived ideas on how to teach Anson on how to recognise ABCs. When Anson started playing with them, I had to throw out of my brain and let my son create his own way of playing. In the process, it was a learning process for me as a father too.
Instead of forcing Anson to learn that A is A, I let him imagine what he can use the A as. This allows him to play with the alphabets, at the same time spend more time with each alphabet and increases exposures to that particular letter.
One of the ways which he associates the alphabets is to relate it with things he sees in his toys. For example, the letter O is round as the wheel on his favourite toy car. In doing so, he recognised that the letter O is a as round as the wheels on his car and helps him to recognise the letter faster.
Anson "zhng" his favourite toy car!
Cars, being Anson's favourite toy, can be constructed using a H and two Is.
Alphabets in blue symbolise water and he imagines that when there are a lot of blue alphabets water, and he pretends to pour water all over them.
The letter A with the pointed end is like a gun to him. We don't have a toy gun in the house so he imagines that A is a gun and we went haunting "monsters" in the house with the letter A.
If I were to pick up the letter A and tell him it was the letter A, Anson would ignore me. However, he pointed to the letter A on my laptop's QWERTY keyboard and when I asked him to pick up the A from the alphabet block, he did it with great enthusiasm.
When Anson pointed to the letter P, I told him it was P and again he went to search for the alphabet P with similar enthusiasm.
Creativity starts at home and as a father, rather then being an educator, at three, it is better to be your son's playmate.
Most important, as a father, you provide the toys, but let your child set the rules of the games. Guide your child during the learning process. See it as a learning process for yourself too as a father, rather than a teaching process, and both of you can have endless fun too.
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