My daughter(Ginalong) is a 3rd grade of elementary school student.
I have no idea about the best way (especially about choosing the conversation subject )to her.
I do not have any experience teaching young children, but I will try to answer based on my basic textbook knowledge of child development.
At that age children need a lot of variety. They need to change topics every minute.
Also, the topics have to be concrete: food, mommy, daddy, a cartoon character, the teacher, a toy.
Moreover, their thinking is very egocentric. In their mind, they are at the centre of the universe. So if they don’t understand concretely how a topic affects them directly, they probably won’t be interested. So the topic has to be the food they ate today, not just any food. It has to be their mommy, not another person’s mommy or mommies in general. It has to be the cartoon characters they watch everyday…etc
Finally, they will be good at describing things they see, or remembering things, or perhaps comparing one thing with another in terms of its physical characteristics-- colour, shape, weight, number etc, but they may not be able to give reasons or evaluate something based on how useful it is, or how beautiful… that is, in a more abstract way
But as I said before, this is just based on my reading. Anybody have any real experience…? Skyblueteapot? Mark? Ana? Steve? Anybody ?
I understand what you said. Thank you for your advice. What do you think the suitable approach for her to study at LingQ?
gina,
I have 5 grandchildren, ages 11, 9, 8, 7, 5. They are interested in different things. The boys prefer sports and adventure stories, one likes Start Wars and the other does not. The girls like stories about girls.
In general children like stories. We do not have a lot of children’s content at LingQ. I think we should create a children’s stories category. However, this is not a priority since we do not have many children using LingQ.
I would recommend that you google English children’s stories. You will find lots of material. Some of it you may be able to import in to LingQ. I doubt if much of it can be shared at LingQ because of copyright issues. If you do find content that is free of copyright please let us know. You can then share it with others and earn points. We will then create a category for children’s stories.
If your daughter is willing to listen to stories on an MP3 player, and read on the computer and save LingQs, then it is just a matter of finding content of interest. You can search our Library, or as I said, look on the Internet.
I suspect that your daughter will be happier with a real book, and a CD. I am curious to hear how she reacts to LingQ.
There are a lot of sites for kids out there, some of them related to well-known characters from TV, some of them for native kids who are learning to read. I think they can be a great way of making her interested in English.
yes, she is interested in Sponge bob~~ and I bought the several Barbie’s books(step into reading). Her favorite sport is the racing. Thank you all ^ ^ . That’s helpful for me . And I’ll search the pod casts for kids. She is out for playing toy car racing now…
Maybe you can buy DVD’s with sound in English and you own language? Than you can first look the movie in your own language and after that in English. I will do this with my daughter too!
Thank you VeraI! I’ll try.