Chapter 10 Chapter 2 Make Learning Easy

Yuanyuan is not the kind of "prodigy" who can know thousands of characters at the age of two or three, and I have never deliberately taught her to read, and I have never made her a literacy card.But just after her sixth birthday and more than half a year before starting elementary school, she gave us a surprise—suddenly knew so many words! She no longer pestered me to tell her a story. The little person actually took a book and read it with great interest.I asked her to read me a new Mickey Mouse magazine, and she literally read it guessing.I sincerely praised my daughter and praised her for reading well.

For the first time, she experienced the pleasure of reading brought by literacy, and her interest in reading alone became stronger and stronger.Through reading, she also learned a lot of new characters. Such a virtuous circle has greatly increased Yuanyuan's literacy.Even a few months later, when she was in the first grade of elementary school, reading Chinese textbooks was a piece of cake for her. I remember that she was a primary school student on the first day, and she carried a schoolbag of textbooks back from school.When I got home, I took out the new books one by one and put them on the dining table, my face was full of excitement.Dad found an old wall calendar and gave her a local book cover. She sat next to her father and read the Chinese book from beginning to end with great interest.Listening to her reading sound, I am very relieved to know that my daughter has easily passed the "literacy level" that primary school students have to face without knowing it.

Yuanyuan was able to reach the literacy and reading level of a third-grade child when she first entered elementary school. This seemed like a small "miracle", which surprised the teacher and surprised me.But I knew very well in my heart that Yuanyuan was an extremely ordinary child. She suddenly knew so many characters in a short period of time. In fact, it was a very simple and natural process, an inevitable change from quantitative to qualitative.The occurrence of this phenomenon is ultimately due to education, which is the result of a correct education method implemented by parents intentionally or unintentionally.

I would like to talk about my approach here, with the aim of helping more children learn to read easily and early, like Yuanyuan.This is not only meaningful to children at the preschool or elementary school literacy stage, but may also have a profound impact on his lifelong learning. My approach is actually very simple, that is, from the first time I picked up a book to tell her a story, I did not "tell", but "read".That is to say, do not convert the content of the story into spoken language or "children's language", but read to her word by word according to the words in the book.

I think, for a child who is as pure as white paper, any vocabulary is brand new to him.What we consider "popular" or "unpopular" is actually the same to him. "The big bad wolf walks leisurely" or "The big bad wolf walks slowly", to the children who are just learning to speak, they don't find it more difficult to understand.What we first instilled in him, he accepted.When some parents tell stories to their children, they are afraid that the children will not understand, so they convert written language into popular spoken language, which is actually unnecessary.Just like a person who speaks Chinese from an early age has difficulty in facing English, but a child who has listened to English since childhood never finds it difficult to listen to English.So don't worry, children are naturally curious about everything, and "reading" or "telling" to him is equally attractive to him.

I started telling stories to Yuanyuan before she was one year old. I don’t know if she understood when I first read to Yuanyuan, but every time I read to her, she was fascinated by it, and her bright eyes were full of joy. of gloss.The book I bought for her was read by us over and over again. Every time I read it word by word, and when Yuanyuan started to talk, I followed the babbling of the parrot, and I became more and more able to understand the stories my mother told me every sentence. He recited it out, and often pretended to read by himself. I clearly remember that when Yuanyuan was one year old and eight months old, her father's colleague came to visit her. Yuanyuan stood beside her uncle and told herself stories, reading "The Ugly Duckling" with great concentration.She pointed to the words on the book with her little finger, and read word by word: "The little duckling walked to the river listlessly..." She flipped through the pages, "reading" almost word for word.The uncle was very surprised when he saw this, thinking that she could read and write.I laughed and said, where, she memorized everything I read to her.She definitely didn't have the concept of words at that time. It is estimated that she didn't know the relationship between the words in her mouth and the pointing of her fingers. She was just mechanically imitating the voice and movements of her mother when telling stories.

In this way, I have been telling stories to Yuanyuan in the way of "reading", paying attention to the sound and emotion.As she grew up, I found that substituting "reading" for "speaking" did not affect her understanding at all, and it also enriched her language vocabulary.She can always find the right words to express when she speaks, and there are very few children who want to express but don't know how to say, or the difficulty of expressing the meaning. Moreover, in the process, she began to recognize some characters, which convinced me of the benefits of "reading".So I went a step further, changing from me pointing at each word and reading it to her pointing at me to read it.Where she pointed, I read.Gradually, Yuanyuan understood the function of words and connected the story with words.In her eyes, words are not empty and boring at all. Words have content, and words are stories, which are interesting and vivid.

At the same time, when we take her to public places, we always point out some words to her without losing the opportunity. For example, I read "No Smoking" to her at the train station and told her that there are many people and the air is bad. This sign tells everyone not to smoke. Smoking here; when visiting the zoo, we read the signposts together, and then we found the animals we wanted to see; when we entered the department store, we first looked at the shopping guideboards together, and went straight to the floor we were going to. Over time, Yuanyuan developed a habit of wanting to read the words whenever she saw them.Every time I take her on the bus, she will keep reading the shop names and billboards on both sides of the road, and ask me if she doesn’t know the words, and I always read those signs with her with great interest, Read some interesting store names, we will talk about it together.

I haven't counted when and how many characters Yuanyuan knew. Based on my impression, the characters she knew before the age of five were scattered and scattered. She couldn't read books by herself, so I always told her.After the age of five, within a short period of time—maybe it was caused by some accidental factor, for example, she asked her mother to tell a story, but her mother said that she didn’t have time, so you should read it by yourself first, so she started to read books by herself.The strong curiosity about the content of the book made her ignore the unfamiliarity of the text, and swallowed it to read the outline, and her curiosity was satisfied.I praised her in time for knowing so many characters, reading books by herself, and reading to her the characters she didn’t know, and the story was absorbed by her——she got great pleasure from reading completely personally, Since then, the momentum has been unstoppable. The more books I read, the more words I recognize.

After Yuanyuan reached the second grade of elementary school, her reading ability was equivalent to that of middle school students.When most of the students in the class were still focusing their energy on learning new characters, she had already started reading novels one after another.Of course, she often reads typos, so that we jokingly call her the "King of White Characters".I reminded her to ask her parents when she encountered a word she didn't know. Because she was eager to read the story, she usually didn't ask us about the words that didn't affect her understanding, and we didn't care.In fact, if you read a lot, many "white characters" will naturally be solved.

By the time Yuanyuan graduated from elementary school at the age of ten, she had read all of Jin Yong's martial arts novels, 14 volumes totaling about 30 to 40 volumes; several fairy tales of Zheng Yuanjie's series; in addition, there were foreign masterpieces such as , and Chinese classics, etc. There are countless other scattered children's literature books and various newspapers and magazines. Because Yuanyuan has read a lot of books and has a good comprehension ability, she is also excellent in other subjects, and her studies are always easy.She finished the second grade of elementary school and went directly to the fourth grade of elementary school, and she is still one of the top students in the class.She is the youngest in the class, but her maturity in doing things and the level of understanding problems seem to be a few years older than her actual age. When Yuanyuan was in the fourth grade of primary school, I bought her a children's edition in traditional Chinese characters, sixteen mo, about one inch thick.We often took time to read together, because she didn't know traditional Chinese characters, so I pointed to her and read to her at the beginning.Halfway through the book, traditional characters were basically no longer a problem for her, and she read the second half by herself.Now she reads some Chinese materials published in Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas, and finds it very convenient. At the National People's Congress held in 2008, a representative proposed that primary school students should learn traditional Chinese characters, and many media reported on this proposal.The idea of ​​this representative is very good, but what I am worried about is that if this idea is implemented in school teaching and children are asked to learn traditional characters with the current conventional literacy methods, elementary school students will really be exhausted to death. The heavy academic burden of elementary school students is not only caused by too many "extracurricular classes", but more importantly, it is caused by incorrect teaching methods.The way for children to learn characters is basically limited to texts. Each new character is often written ten or twenty times, and they are recognized and written in isolation. This makes the children pay very hard work, but get little achievement.Writing simplified characters still worries the children terribly, writing traditional characters... If the children know it, they will definitely oppose this proposal. Traditional Chinese characters are not impossible to learn, the most important thing is how to learn easily. In the education of Yuanyuan, I deeply realized that it is a very effective educational method to integrate the learning of new characters into daily life and build on the basis of a lot of reading.Not only is it easy for children to learn, but it is actually easy for adults, too. Whenever I see some parents triumphantly declare how many words or how many English words their preschool children have recognized, and his method is to make a lot of cards or paste English words all over the house, I always I'm a little worried, is that all right? There are still many "early education institutions". Their so-called "early education" is actually to let children know some words or letters and words.Some tricks may be used in the learning process, some play the role of "letters", some call out a certain syllable together, and the essence is to learn words in isolation.I wonder, is such a course meaningful to children? One of the most important contributions of the famous American psychologist Ausubel in educational psychology is to propose "meaningful learning", which is a concept opposite to "mechanical learning".His key assertion is that meaningful learning is valuable.According to his theory, meaningless syllables and paired adjectives can only be learned mechanically, because it is impossible for such materials to establish a substantial connection with any existing concepts in the human cognitive structure, such learning is completely mechanical learning.So it is inefficient learning. A few days ago, I read another news in the newspaper, saying that a four-year-old child can recognize 2,000 Chinese characters.It turned out that it was his grandfather who posted the words all over the house and asked the children to recognize them every day.Anyone who learns a foreign language knows that if you memorize words in isolation, you will forget them quickly, but if you learn the words in context, the effect will be very good.Therefore, if a child recognizes a lot of characters but cannot concentrate on reading a book, that is a very bad thing.Separating literacy from reading may destroy children's interest in literacy and self-confidence early. If showing off is added to the study, it is the worst. I am afraid it is just making a beautiful soap bubble. Rousseau said: "Men are painstakingly searching for the best way to teach reading and writing. Some have invented phonics cards and flashcards. Some have turned a child's room into a printing factory. What a pity!" Harmonious and reasonable methods are often beautiful and effective; bad methods make simple things complicated and inefficient; we must pay special attention to finding good methods in children's education, and don't take it for granted to use bad methods to teach children. ●From the first time I picked up a book to tell her a story, I didn't "tell" but "read".That is to say, do not convert the content of the story into spoken language or "children's language", but read to her word by word according to the words in the book. ●Gradually, the mother reads each word by pointing at the beginning, and then the child points and the mother reads.Where the child points, the mother reads.In this way, children gradually understand the role of words and connect stories with words. ●When we take her to public places, we always point out some words to her without losing the opportunity. For example, I read "No Smoking" to her at the train station and told her that there are many people and the air is not good. Smoking here. ●If you read a lot, many "white characters" will be solved naturally. ●It is a very effective educational method to integrate the learning of new words into daily life, based on a large amount of reading.Not only is it easy for children to learn, but it is actually easy for adults, too. ●If a child recognizes a lot of characters but cannot concentrate on reading a book, it is a very bad thing.Separating literacy from reading may destroy children's interest in literacy and self-confidence early.

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