When my daughter was in first grade, whole year I had been very busy being a care giver to elders in family.
I just could not sit with her to teach her properly.
While Maths, English and little bit of science she was able to cover once in a while taking my help and with guidance from her elder sister.
It was Hindi that we ended up ignoring.
My daughter is a bright kid, but closer to her term exam I realized that she is clueless about Hindi Varnmala , and Barakhadi was alien concept to her. She was not able to recognize letters , so reading 2 and 3 letter words was some thing that was obviously difficult to master in such short time.
We had only one week to cover all the things. That included reading two /three letter words and matching these to relevant pictures.
I did not want her to feel that she does not know Hindi. And that she is the only one in class who is in such bad state. After all it was my fault that I did not helped her from beginning.
So I set out to design something that we can use and reuse in the one week to learn and practice Hindi Varnmala.
That’s when I designed the erase and write cards for her. Laminated it at home with self lamination sheets.
My idea was to practice with these cards so that she is able to associate sound with image of letter. So that it will help us in recognizing a letter and read words one letter at a time.
First two days we practiced laying emphasis on visual recognition method.
We took a card traced the line with beads and gems, pulses too.
Next step was to trace the lines using whiteboard marker pen .
Once done we wiped it with clean cloth and its ready for second use.
Once she got bored of tracing the line, I added some novelty by giving her a sand tray so that she could copy the letters from card on sand.
We used an old kulfi stick (round one) for this.
It helped a lot . My daughter very quickly learnt recognizing the Hindi Varnmala and associate with the sound of letter. She also made significant progress in joining words and reading simple two letter words. At this point I did not put much emphasis on writing skill, as that’s something I intend to focus on post her term exam.
Leave a Reply