Dear Ayesha
i am serious now about teaching tina arabic , she already understands a lot and speak a little but i was taking it slowly because she just started reading in english and is enjoying it , and knows a lot of french , so i didn’t want to do a lot .
i am just not convinced flash cards is the way to go , yes they can be helpful to teach vocabulary and meaning of things , but would they learn to read by just memorising words ?? i doubt . so like you i would start with the alphabet . i actually like the montessori aproach and it worked well for us in english which is pur phonic .
i printed out all the arabic alphabets on very fine sandpaper letters and glued them on carboard A5 size , tina can run her finger over the letters and feel them , than she can try to trace them in sand or cornmeal put in baking tray .
together with the alphabet will be useful to have set of picture cards few for each letter , and we can play a sort of i spy game : i spy something that starts with b , could be bab , battah , bayt ( sorry have no arabic keyboard but I am getting one ) . this is an easy way for the kids to learn the alphabet and also lots of words in arabic begining with the letter or ending or in the middle .
once this is done we can move to what montessori calls moveable alphabet , similar to your fridge magnets , we can choose easy words similar to dad dude list but in arabic , and the kids would learn that by putting letters together they can make words . so maybe we can work on creating such list of simple phonetic arabic words . i am thinking to google montessori arabic and see if other parents have created such list .
i showed tina lots of words in flashcards, ybcr , lr , but only when she saw lists of phonetic words like dad dude lists that she got the idea and started reading .
what do you think ??
oh by the way , i did something i feel a bit crazy , i enrolled tina three times a week , for one hour every time in an arabic school , her class is just what they call : hadanah , they teach one letter a week , they sing , and read a story .
so far i am punished because tina won’t stay in class without me , i thought she will get used to it , but she is not , she wants to go but mummy should stay . i won’t accept the classical aproach of letting her cry and she will accept it , she doesn’t have to , i told them clearly if they mind my presence i will take her out , if she doesn’t want to stay alone it means she is not ready yet , but still i like her to be around people speaking arabic , so if they don’t mind i would stay and i can even help the teacher , i can speak read and write arabic , hmmm, i also want to make sure nothing is forced on tina that she is not ready for , you see the traditional way of teaching is so much different that how i am teaching tina and this forum parents approach .
i think why i bother , why don’t we stay home and just spend these three hours a week playing reading and singing in arabic . well alone at home we don’t do it , and i really thought she will pick it up better if she is surrounded with kids and grown up talking in arabic and has no other choice .
i tried to make similar playgroup at home for free where i get few of tina’s friends to play and i teach them at the same time , we tried we yoga , we tried with french , but my house is so attractive with lots of interesting things to do that kids do not really want to learn when they come to us so we end up painting playing playdough , swimming , jumping on the trampoline , dressing up .and because most kids even if arabic is their first language can speak english or french , they immediately switch to english when they know tina speaks english . can you blame them . even her grandmother would struggle to speak english , and ignore me begging her to speak arabic
love
viv
. (just started a new teaching job- after a blissfull, wonderful, exhilerating year out) um yes i do have the Little Reader, i’ve been using it with Nawaal for about three weeks now, prior to that she was watching the YBCR dvds about once a day since she was three months old. However as yet she has not attempted to ‘read’ in any way…i understand she is still quite small, but when you see videos of nine month old babies read, its astonishing.