Talkers, Watchers and Doers

Yes, I borrowed another book by Cheri Fuller.  This time, it's called Talkers, Watchers and Doers.  Another wonderful book by her.  The book talks about how kids learn, some kids learn visually (watchers), some learn auditory (talkers) and some learn kinesthetically (doers), and how you can help your children to learn and study better by understanding how they learn.  As I read this book I began to understand why flash cards, which has receive so much publicity and worked on so many children, doesn't seems to work on my 2 kids.  Majority of people or kids learn visually, thus flash card works on them well.  But there is a minority of us who learn differently and I realised that it's true with my 2 kids.  My elder son is a Doer, he learns best when he is hands on. For example, in his childcare, his teacher told us that he is always the first one to raise his hand if they is any new projects that involved the hands.  He can't seems to sit still and have difficulty paying attention in class. Flash cards that involved only his visual sense bored him, so does reading a book.  According to Cheri, for such learner you need to involve his 5 senses to maximise his learning, she gave examples where a parent taught her kid's multiplication by asking him to repeat the rules every time he throw a basket ball.  This explain why I always have difficulty getting my boy to sit still and listen to me read storybook.  I normally has to play up the storybook, make a lot of funny actions before I get his attention.  As for my daughter, she will run away every time I what to teach her using flash cards. But she loves to sing songs and nursery rhymes, at 28 months, she can now recite about 20 nursery rhymes by hard both in English and Chinese.  She can also speak very well and she now speaks in almost perfect sentences.  Her teacher told me she is like a bird in class, talking and talking away.  According to the book, these individuals are auditory learners, they learn best by singing and listening.  This explain why my daughter like me to sing to her and read storybook to her, she can ask me to repeat the storybook again and again until she can recite it by heart.

I'm still half way through this book, but I'm beginning to understand and have an idea now how I can help my 2 kids to learn better.  For a start, am going to teach my girl alphabets and phonics using songs and dance instead of flashcards.  Let's see if my experiment works.

Another thumbs up for Cheri!  For parents who are struggling with their children's study, this is a good book to have.

Schools Start at Home

Ok, I have been really lazy with blogging lately, kinda got addicted to a game in facebook....sigh....

But I meant to pen this down, a book that I recently read and felt that it's a good one to recommend to all kiasu parents out there. It's called School Starts at Home: Simple Ways to Make Learning Fun (School Savvy Kids). The books wrote about skills that you should build in your child before they go to school and how you can inculcate this skills in them.  Skills such as reading, writing, maths etc and how you can build up their love for these skills.  What I like about this book that it's a really easy to read book and some of the tips quite practical and useful.  For example, to get your kids to like writing, encourage him to help you write your groceries list or write a list of presents he/she likes for your birthday.  I tried this on my son and he wrote quite a long list of presents.  A thumbs up to Fuller, am going to try borrowing her other 2 books: