English for the little ones

English for the little ones

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  ASmartLearner LLC [email protected] www.besmartlearner.com By RonaRose
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  What makes thisbook different? 1. This book is a tutorial where the role of the teacher can be performed by a parent. The book can also be used by the tutors in kindergartens and by the teachers in pre-schools. This is a versatile tutorial with innovative home schooling approach. 2. The content is the specially selected grammatical models. This has become possible due to the ideas developed by Noam Chomsky, a scholar in computational linguistics. We use his transformational rules to create the language patterns. The vocabulary is “animals”. A child also gets familiarized with the basics of the English grammar by means of using signs and symbols. 3. The purpose of our innovative method is to develop the intellectual skills of the child based on the usage of speech-and-grammatical patterns of the English language. English thus is the tool to develop abstract thinking abilities of a child. 4. The mother language is the main means of communication and it is not excluded from the educational process. 5. Grammatical models are represented by the signs and symbols. 6. Signs and symbols used in our book represent basic geometric shapes: circle, triangle and square and in such a way we teach a child some geometry, mathematical skills.
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  7. Main learningactivities of a child according to our method is the development of pre- reading and pre-writing skills. As symbols and signs are larger units than more abstract letters and phonemes, the child learns to read by symbols and signs a lot faster and more productive than by phones approach. This special pre-reading and pre-writing skills are especially helpful to children with dyslexia. 8. The book includes a lot of exercises to promote motor skills. 9. A parent may not know English. That’s not a big deal! There is a transcript in a book, explaining how to teach every lesson. Upon the completion of the educational process a parent also understands the basics of the English language. 10. In conclusion it should be said that this technique was tested during the 2-year’s experiment in a kindergarten in 1985, with the groups of children of 4 and 5 years old. The result of the experiment was presented at the meeting of the Scientific Council of the “Institute for Advanced Teacher Training” in Kharkov (Ukraine) and was approved as “excellent”. Recommendations were given to write the manual about this technique, which resulted in writing this book.
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  Many years passedsince the idea to write a book teaching English to kids and parents came to my mind and now I want to share it with you. I started my career as a teacher at school, teaching English to children in a secondary school and found out, that it was too late to start teaching a foreign language to the kids of age 11-12 years old. The linguistic ability to grasp languages at this age was declining and we, as teachers, were simply wasting our efforts: it was hard for the children to master a new language and it was hard for the teacher to make them learn it. The learning process became painful and in most cases unsuccessful. The natural way out of this precarious situation was to start teaching English as early as possible, when kids can start learning with no effort, when new words are remembered in no time and speech in a foreign language comes as easy as the mother language. So I started experimenting with the kid’s age at which learning a foreign language can be done most easy and in a favorable way. My approach was different from just developing the bilingual kids. When developing a bilingual child one should speak with a child in both languages. Usually two parents can do this effortlessly by speaking with a child in two languages simultaneously and then a child can speak both languages. But who in my country at this time, the former USSR, could speak English at home to a child?
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  Most parents ofmy school kids did not know any foreign language and thus could not help with early exposure of kids to a foreign language. I started my experiment at the kindergarten, where my eldest son was. We agreed with the district officials and the parents of the group that I would start teaching children, my son included, English, according to my own method. And so I did. I taught English to kids 3-5 years old, those, who had already developed skills in a mother language, Russian. I used Russian to explain and to translate words and some grammar rules. Keep in mind that my grammar rules were “special” rules developed specifically for the kids of that age. I also did not exclude the mother language, Russian, from the learning environment. Then you may ask what was so new and special about my method? I used signs and symbols instead of words and sentences! That was the idea! That was new, special and breaking through all previous approaches and teaching methods! Usually when teaching English to the pre-school age kids, the teachers teach kids orally, utilizing some rhymes, some popular songs, everyday phrases, and when the parents heard their kids “talking” (in my opinion reciting), they were sure their kid reproducing rhymes, songs, some speech patterns never made further then the summer break. When kids came back to school again, nothing was remembered, and the hard work to master the foreign language had to be started all over again. As soon as I discovered the new method in teaching English as a second language, there was a huge difference! The fun stuff was still there and we were still learning the rhymes and songs, but that was not all. We did not stop there. I started to teach them real English language represented in signs and symbols.
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  Like ancient peoplewho started their language from the pictures carved in the stone and slowly passed on to the hieroglyphs (half signs and half pictograms), we started with the pictures and slowly transited to meaningful symbols and signs organized in certain sentence structures. It was a pre-reading and pre-writing level when kids were engaged in their learning activities based on a developing the analytical skills of their brains. I was actually very much surprised to know that the ability to think, analyze and generalize was never taught to kids as a skill. I have come to an understanding that this skill may be and must be trained at the earliest possible age! I think of the children’s brains as a muscle, which requires special training in order to grow and develop cognitive strength. Now, after going through the special training in my group, when the kid goes home for a vacation, it’s not only the rhymes and songs he carries in his memory, but a notebook with his own drawings, symbols, signs and even sentences! Now he is able to hook his memory on these visual helpers, and refresh the knowledge at any moment. So, time in between the lessons is not wasted as long as the kid is able to look at his drawings and pictures, signs and symbols! And even more, he was able to play with this new reality as long as he wants and to create some new sentences, even if he doesn’t know the word at the moment he wants to use it! Incredible, you may say. Yes, and it is! The efficiency of the lessons is tremendously high. The English has become not only fun to learn, but also the efficient intellectual boost in the child’s development. The kids in my group have become the best in all other activities. I started wondering why that is so, what helped my kids to become the smartest kids in the flock!
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  First, I realizedthat the learning process for the kid to have the greatest impact on his development must be successful! A simple thought, but never actually followed up in the school systems. I would like to reiterate again. The learning process must be successful, based on one successful step, followed by the next successful step. Next step has to be based on the success of the previous step. If this is missing, then stop, go back, get successful accomplishment of the assignment, and only then move forward. Only positive reinforcement can make the learning process fruitful. Why do we have special aid kids? Because, and I am 100% confident, there was no positive reinforcement in the learning process at their early stage of learning. Kid has to get pleasure out of intellectual work! If there is none, the kid will overstrain, get tired, and start hating the whole process. It is exactly the reason why lots of kids resist learning! Second, it turns out that the use of signs and symbols as learning tools can be used to develop the cognitive function of the kid’s brain! Teaching kids to code and decode, to use and create language models can develop their symbolic abilities, abilities which make the basis of the human intellect. Just like working with the weights in the gym can help to build up the muscles, same is true with symbols and signs when the brain works with them helping to build up brain power. I have found that activity is indispensable in developing kids’ brains at the early age! And this activity is fun and has tremendous positive impact on the child’s intellect, and also creates a great motivation both for the kids and the parents! Who among the parent does not want their kid to be smart and educated! Every kid in my group was successful and the feeling that they could “do it!”. In general teaching English for teachers and learning English for kids and parents has finally became mutually advantageous for all the parties involved.
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  I hope thisapproach can tremendously help dyslexic kids, whose mother language is English, to master pre-reading and pre-writing skills. Letters are highly abstract entities; they were invented historically after the pictograms and hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs are actually much more abstract entities than the pictures. The meaning of the pictogram can be easily deciphered. Phonemes and letters on the other hand are more abstract, and therefore much more difficult to be deciphered. One needs to have coding and decoding skills to process phonemes and letters. So, by teaching how to code and decode signs and symbols instead deciphering letters and phonemes we can help to develop the necessary skills to read and write much earlier, before the kid actually goes to school and is taught how to read by means of letters! The process of reading for a dyslexic kid means decoding letters into phonemes and then deriving a meaning as a result of joining the sounds and letters together, too much of effort for a dyslexic brain. On the contrary, when he is reading by means of signs and symbols, symbolic phrases and sentences all he has to do is just to decode a symbol or sign at a time, knowing how the word or sentence sound, it is much easier and much more fun. Coding and decoding signs and symbols truly develop the abstract thinking, that brain muscle, so much required in learning activities and comprehension of language structures of the mother language as well as of the foreign one. In other words, language signs and symbols can be used as a tool in developing cognitive symbolic function of a dyslexic brain. Thus, teaching reading and writing English by means of using language signs and symbols presented as language structural models can be used not only for teaching English as a second foreign language, but also as a tool to fight dyslexia in kids whose native language is English.
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  This method isdifferent from the well-known Rebus models, because I use signs and symbols as speech models/patterns, not just as semantic signs and symbols. The models I use are language models, not memory signs! Sometimes I call my method “Hieroglyphic English” in order to trace back to the origination of the idea of the method. The English language can be sliced and diced to some finite nuclei grammatical structures and then by means of generative rules enriched to the infinite variability of the everyday language. The program starts with teaching kids 10 main speech models, which will allow naming the objects, describing them in terms of colors, size, numbers, and character/quality. I have chosen the topic of animals, because kids love to play with animal toys and therefore that activity will serve as a great motivation to study. The grammatical notions, such as nouns, adjectives, verbs are represented by different shapes and colors. The shapes and colors were experimentally chosen as the ones which kids can easily draw and remember. Shape and color play the important role in teaching by signs and symbols as some extra mnemonic factors. The speech models were placed on the classroom walls to help kids to remember how the sentences are constructed. Look at the sentence below. Can you read it? I bet you can’t, unless you know the vocabulary and grammatical rules. There are symbols and signs which model a language structure, like the above sign. But there are also operative signs, telling the instructions of what needs to be done on a certain page.
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  Operative sign This signmeans: “Look”, “Write”, “Read” as it somehow has a meaning which can be easily derived from the drawing itself. I wrote a text book in English Hieroglyphic both for students, parents and teachers, whoever has more time and passion to teach the kids pre-reading and pre-writing skills, which will tremendously help children in their everyday study, and not only in the English language, but also to excel in many other learning activities, which require abstract thinking and reasoning. The book and program is designed so that there is one page or screen for the kid and one page or screen for the parent. The page for the parent has the explanations on what’s on the kid’s page and how to work with it. The process may take the reverse direction and it will be the kid, explaining to the parent what he/she has learned in a program. The goal will be achieved when the kid can read and write 10 sentences about one of his/her favorite animals.
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  The strength ofthe method lies also in the fact that the students can become sentence generators. Instead of memorizing the words and sentences, the kid can now start writing his own words and sentences and use the words he never heard before. We were studying to write a sentence about a bear, when one of the kids came up to me and said: “I want to write about the fire truck. What is the English word for the fire truck?” And instead of the sentence we were working on “This is a bear” he wrote “This is a fire truck”! Tell me that this is not creativity! I wish you good luck in your journey to master the English language, pre-reading and pre-writing skills using my method as a reliable navigator. The book and the program were designed to help you to reach that happy land of knowledge with freedom from boredom and failure! The target audience for that early literacy program is children of 3-5 years old. The role of the teacher is taken by the parent or the teacher. The environment is a family or a class in a kindergarten. The guide presented in a book gives the adults the guidelines for every lesson. Our program will help to prepare a child for school and pass school entry assessment (SEA). Though to pass SEA successfully is not the goal of our program. The goal is to develop the major cognitive skills by means of mastering main speech and grammatical patterns, as well as pre-reading and pre-writing skills. Our goal is to train mind by means of a language acquisition.
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  What are themain characteristics of our program? 1. Parent can perform the role of a teacher. There is no requirement that he/she knows English. The parent and a child study together in a self study way. There is a guide for every page how to read and what to do. 2. Learning is done in the way of discovery. 3.The native language is allowed and is used as an explanatory tool. 4. The program favors creation of visual aids, which can be used on the walls in the house or a classroom. 5. The aim of the program is to develop the cognitive skills by means of a language study. To study English language is not an aim, English language is used as a tool to develop abstract thinking of a child. The program teaches main grammatical notions, like Noun, Verb, Adjective, Numeral, Pronoun etc, implicitly, teaching kids to classify different words with regard to their function and role in communication. 6. The program also teaches major mathematical notions, like number, shape, relativity. Grammatical notion of a Numeral teaches kids about the numbers, syntax representation of grammatical notions teaches kids about the shapes, conjunction teaches kids relativity. 7. Our course goes at a pace which is comfortable for a kid. There will be never a feeling that your learning process is slow. But there is only one condition though, you do not go to a next page unless you master the previous. 8. There is a certain load of difficulties every page, they grow gradually, from simple things to more complicated. The course ends by the moment when the kid can read and write a pattern of 10 sentences.
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  9. The topicof the program is based on description of an animal. The program can be easily extended to other topic, enriching the vocabulary of the student. Other topics may follow after successful publication of this book. 10. There is an educational software program, which can be used to create an e- learning environment.