Series Q&A 6: How to better use Lele Word Cards

# Let’s first talk about what is the function of word cards? What are the limitations of word cards?

Word cards are generally used to teach children to read, but what is literacy? Character recognition includes the mastery of three aspects: word form, word pronunciation, and word meaning. However, word cards can usually only complete the first two tasks, which is to correctly match the word shapes and pronunciations, and read the correct pronunciation when seeing the word cards.
As for the third task, mastering the meaning of words, the character cards are limited. It is easier for some physical words to express the meaning of the word card words with physical objects or pictures, but the "meaning" of many words is understood by reading, especially abstract words such as adjectives and prepositions. Even physical words, when two or more single words When combined, the meaning changes. For example: water, hand. You can understand it by drawing a picture, but the meaning of "sailor" changes. So don’t rely too much on word cards to understand the meaning of a word or phrase. Many words/words cannot be understood correctly through explanation (sometimes the more explanation, the easier it is to lead to misunderstanding). Children are very smart and can often understand the meaning of words quickly from reading. The best way to understand is to keep words and sentences together, which is why we always hope to embody the meaning of literacy through reading.

# Based on the characteristics of Chinese characters, discuss how to use character cards more effectively:

Chinese is not a Latin language. Unlike English, when a word appears, you will get hints from the letters and guess the pronunciation of the word. When we see a Chinese character on a word card, we can only remember the pronunciation of the character through repeated practice. (Although pictophonetic characters account for a large proportion of Chinese characters, the chance of making mistakes while reading is also half, not to mention that children who are new to Chinese do not have the ability to read while reading). Therefore, the correct combination of "forms and sounds" of Chinese characters requires reading more, reading more, and reviewing more. There is no shortcut.
And reading more, watching more, and reading simple picture books is certainly more interesting than just looking at word cards. Because reading brings in the "meaning" of words, and with the help of illustrations, the "form, pronunciation, and meaning" of each word are completely combined, and the text conveys the meaning of the text well, resulting in the so-called "Reading fun". In contrast, the reading of single-character flashcards is particularly "dry". Especially for non-specific words, such as "hao, zai, ke" and other abstract words, it is more difficult to combine the shape and pronunciation of the characters, and the understanding of the meaning is also more difficult. difficulty.

Therefore, we have always emphasized reading simple picture books "first" and using word cards "later". In this way, the cross-use of reading and word cards makes reading and literacy complement each other and achieve better literacy results. Children who are new to learning Chinese, especially overseas children, do not feel the benefits of learning Chinese. They tend to feel that learning Chinese will take up a lot of their playing time. How to avoid this "dislike of Chinese" emotion, we must let children read first. Taste the "sweetness" of reading and feel the meaning and fun of Chinese language, instead of memorizing a lot of word cards first. The result is often that you can recognize a lot of word cards, but cannot read. We hope that after simply reading the picture book, children can use word cards to review and enhance their memory of word pronunciation and shape through various word card games. They can also use flash word cards to understand the child's approximate "literacy level."

# Provide some interesting and simple ways to use word cards: (I believe many parents and teachers also have many innovative methods)

(A) "Character Card" static game:
1. Bingo or dic tac Tou game
Make several large pieces of nine-square grid cardboard, put the 9 word cards/word cards you just read, and use "soft clay" to paste them in the 9 grids. Adults and children, or many children, can play Bingo or dictacto game.
2. word guessing game,
You can use word cards, cover part of the word card with paper, and let your children guess the words on the card.
You can also use a small post it to cover a certain word on each page when reading the red book, and let the children guess the covered word, especially the abstract word.
3. Find the hidden word or sentence game
自製3X3或4X4等的9格或16格的紙張，每個格子都有一個字，讓孩子找出藏在這張格子紙張裡面的某一個字、某個詞語、某個句子。
4. Word Card Sorting Game
A pile of cards for children to classify: such as food, animal names, actions, etc.
5. Race pronunciation speed game
Two, three or more people put a stack of cards in the middle. Whoever reads the words on the card first will own the card. In the end, there will be a competition to see who has more word cards.

(B) "Word Card" dynamic game:
1. Walk or run to the right word card
Spread the word cards on the floor, and each person says a word. Everyone should stand next to the word.

2. That's wrong?
For physical word cards, stick/place the word cards next to the real thing, but deliberately put one or two wrong ones, and let the children find the wrong ones.

3. action show
Choose a verb card or word card, and after one child reads it, act out the action and let other children guess what word it is.

4. You are⋯⋯/You will⋯⋯⋯
When we were young, we folded the paper from east to west, with east, south, west and north written on the outside, and pasted 8 interesting phrases on the inside, such as: you are a dog/you are a pig, or you can skate/you can eat grass, etc. Then, one child randomly said "East 7/North 8/South 5/West 9", and the other child took the southeast, northwest, and made the corresponding movements to see which origami the selected movement stopped/ phrase, and then pretend to act it out.

(C) Flash cards to test words that can be read and those that cannot be read
By flashing a stack of word cards, you can filter out two types of word cards: "can read" and "can't read". Those who can "discard" can "discard or collect" them. In the future, just focus on reviewing those "can't". This test method is simple and easy to implement. When reading, you can pay more attention to the words you don't know.

# Simple method of organizing word cards

1. Sort by topic
Our elementary story has 500 words, about 65% of which will appear repeatedly in different themes, so the elementary level
The total number of word cards will be well over 500.
The character cards produced by our company are classified according to themes. We provide buckles for character cards with the same theme, allowing buyers to punch holes in the character cards and buckle the character cards with the same theme together for easy selection.
2. According to the pronunciation order (just like a dictionary), you can use buckles to snap words with the same initial consonants together for easy search.
3. Organize according to parts of speech, such as nouns (which can also be subdivided into fruits, food, furniture, animal names, etc.), verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc.

# remind:
When "reviewing" word cards, you need to pay attention to people's memory curve: generally, they remember quickly and forget quickly. Usually, they can still remember it on the first and second days after learning, but they forget it fastest on the third and fourth day, so When using word cards to review, you should review quickly on the third and fourth days. If you wait many days before reviewing, you may completely forget about it. The general principle is that after reading, it is better to spend 1 minutes using word cards to review every day or every other day than to review again after a long time.

What's more important is to remember that word cards are auxiliary tools. We will not require children to "memorize" all the theme word cards before starting to read the next theme story. Basically, it is enough for the child to memorize about 70% of the word cards, but remember to encourage the child to read every storybook on the topic again (or even multiple times). This not only consolidates what has been learned, but also Reading more will give them a deeper understanding and mastery of the form, pronunciation and meaning of words.