Games We Play

Children learn from play. We have been playing some games with KK which helps (we hope) to improve his language skills. Under the 'disguise' of games, KK finds it so fun and interesting he'll be the one proposing we play these games, especially on long car trips.



For English, we play this game where we take turns saying words that starts with the last letter of the previous word. This would hopefully help KK in learning spelling. Another game we play is to take turns naming items beginning with letters from A-Z. I give it a theme to increase the difficulty level. For example, "items beginning from A-Z in a supermarket". So far, we've tried 'at home', 'in the airport' and even 'in Harvey Norman'. KK enjoys it a lot and would often initiate these games with us.



At night, we'll sometimes 'Make a Bedtime Story'. Actually this started when I didn't want to read him a story as it was getting late. So I proposed we just lay in bed and take turns saying one part of 'our own bedtime story'. I'll start off with "Once upon a time,...." and whatever comes to my mind and he'll take it from there. This trains his narrative ability and also stirs his imagination. Hopefully it'll be useful when it comes to writing compositions next time in school.

The first story we created was about "Bobo The Bolster and his smelly story". It turned out to be a very interesting tale of how he couldn't keep himself clean. I also introduced his friends, Pipi the Pillow and Blankio the Blanket to the story. KK had a lot of fun creating the story and we made a sequel the next night. He also narrated the story again to me the next day and made me type it down. He said he wants to sell the story to 'Angus & Robertson' (the book store). I asked him if I can publish the story on my blog and let others read for free but my business-minded son wants people to pay money for his story...so he can use the $$ to buy Wii....haha! So out of respect to the co-author, sorry guys...:-p.

Nowadays, KK is so enthusiastic at making stories, he'll blabber on and on with his crazy imaginative story that I've got no chance to continue. In any case, I'll be too confused and lost by the time he stops to follow up. I don't usually listen to his story content, which can be very far-fetched, but I'm happy to hear him trying to join sentences to describe a series of events that's happening to the story character.

We've been having difficulty getting KK to speak Mandarin here. We've tried using both 'carrot and cane' methods but they don't work. I realised that we can't rush it and force it. Now, we're speaking as much Mandarin as we can remember to him during day to day conversations. He still replies back in English but hopefully, the more he listens, the more he'll absorb and one day he'll feel confident enough to speak back completely in Mandarin. Already he's showing signs of improvement and can reply simple answers as 有, 没有, 要, 不要, 吃饱了 etc.



It is with games that he's shown the most interest recently in using Mandarin. Ironically, we have to use a game of teasing each other in Mandarin to spark off his interest in Chinese words. We would 'throw' each other with bombastic combinations of words which are both comical and crazy. Like "你是西瓜蛋!" (You are a watermelon egg!) I also created another version of creating 'the most disgusting recipes' using crazy combinations of ingredients in Mandarin. These crazy exchanges of words will improve his vocabulary of Chinese words and the boy will actually take the initiative to ask us how to say some words in Mandarin.



This summer vacation, Hubby has taken upon himself to improve KK's handwriting. Unfortunately, we haven't got any games to play for this one. KK was made to write a simple journal entry about what interesting thing he did during his holiday. Then when there's nothing else interesting to write, I simply made him copy some words from a children's book. There were a lot of tears and anguish initially, but the more he practised, the faster and better he wrote. I must say that compare to his previous handwriting which had hanging alphabets and uneven sizes, there is a definite improvement.



KK also learnt to read the clock this holiday. (Seems he learns more at home than at school?) This also took a few hours of grilling over 2 days to make him understand the way hands in the clock works. Now he just needs more practice so now and then, I'll just ask him to tell me the time.



I'm still thinking how to improve his counting skills, especially subtraction and addition of big numbers. He's not much clue how much he should take back when he gives people money. We tried playing Monopoly with him but that's a very long game to play just to get him to count money. Also, he gets pretty upset when everyone else is buying cottages and building castles and he's not.

There seems like a million and one other things to teach the children - social skills, values, character building, sportsmanship, discipline... etc etc. Makes me really understand the importance of a parent's role in our child's life, especially during these formative years.