A New Function. A New Purpose!

When Joey was a baby, we bought some foam alphabet floor mats for her to crawl on. The whole pack of floor mats had been kept in the storeroom since she started walking and it saw the daylight again recently.

Except that it no longer serves its purpose as a floor mat, but as an educational tool now. :)

See the pressed-out alphabets? They have both the capital and the small alphabets, and it was a good tool to teach your kids the 26 alphabets as well as how different they look with and without capital.

For Joey, she can recognize some but not all the alphabets now. She can recognize and pronounce most of those she learnt in her phonics lessons in school. This is the first real learning from school I can see academic-wise.

These are the 4 alphabets she’s most familiar with, of course. And I attribute it to the fact that most of her stuffs are labeled with her name and she sees it so often. Because she can recognize her name, she also demands to see her name written on every present she receives. So if you want to see a big smile on her face when you give her a present, be sure to write her name super big on the front. =)

Together with the ABC song, we also had fun arranging the 26 alphabets in their correct order. I think it’s such a great learning tool because it’s very visual and makes a great impact when the alphabets are all so huge!

I’m glad we found such a good use for something that had been chucked inside the storeroom for so long!

By the way, I am really starting to see the importance of phonics and how beneficial it is in getting children to recognize words and learn pronunciations.

It suddenly dawned upon me that I used to have phonics lessons when I was in Primary School! That time, I always wonder why we have this special class & textbook which none of my friends from other schools seem to have, and the teacher is always making us making funny shhhh and ooooo sounds. Turned out it was a phonics course and I now attribute my good pronunciation and English foundation to that! God bless my Primary School for their foresight when nobody else believed in it! =D Now, phonics is part and parcel of every pre-school education. How nice. :)