5 Easy Ways to Teach Your Child English at Home 03
Welcome back to part three of this series about helping your child learn English at home! If you didn’t get to see the first two parts, please read them first by clicking here.
In our previous two posts we discussed that to help our children learn English at home we should: 1. Start early and 2. Focus on listening first. The third thing we need to do is…
I mentioned in the first point that the very young child has acquired language skills rapidly simply by listening and observing. We can follow this method by letting the child have plenty of chances to hear spoken English and connect those spoken English words with ideas in the environment.
3. Avoid, robots, electronic games, apps, and dumbed-down children’s programming.
I strongly discourage putting your child in front of the TV, or cell phone app to learn English. Robots and electronics as well as online games and apps should be avoided at all costs. These things are known to be detrimental to the social and emotional development of children because they often end up replacing the much-needed interaction between parent and child. They also hinder a child’s ability to form the good habit of attention and make it difficult for children to sleep among many other things.
Children under 2 should really have zero screen time throughout the day. Once they are a bit older and can have some screen time it should be very little, no more than a half an hour a day, even then it should be limited to only the highest quality content.
The greater harm that comes from screen time in young children has a great deal more to do with content than with the actual viewing of the screen. Much of what is considered children’s content on youtube and on TV is of very low quality. The more human interaction and interaction with real things and real life, the better.
Children need real experiences in real life and if your English is not quite good enough to give it to them, then you can view our real-experience videos with your child and then practice with him or her in your daily activities together. When a child is young, she needs plenty of interaction with her parents for all of her developmental needs, especially language. We cannot separate human people from language and replace them with robots. The purpose of language is the connection of human minds with each other.
I hope you have found our series about learning English at home informative so far. Please watch for our next post and until then, happy learning!