5-A-Day-Books with Renzo

Last week, when I went to fetch Renzo from school after work, we met one of his classmates and her mummy at the lift. The friendly mummy pointed out to me that the lift is not working as I didn't notice the signboard pasted on the wall. And Renzo asked, "Mummy, why we are not allowed to use this lift?", I told him to read the message on the signboard so he could find out why. The mummy was in shock when Renzo started reading: "This lift cannot service level 4.....".

So she asked, "Isn't he in K1 also? He can READ??!! How do you teach him to read??!!". Renzo carried on reading:"Sorry for any... any... mummy what is this word?". I tried to break down the word "inconvenience" into 4 syllables and point at the letters while Renzo was decoding and sounding out "in-con-ven-ience", and then I explained to the mummy about how we guide Renzo to "decode" complex words by breaking it down based on syllables, make the sound of each syllable, blend them together and sound it out.

The mummy said bye to us with an amazed face, leaving me behind, wondering for a while about the question, how do we teach Renzo to read?!

I probably have never shared any tips here about how, because we never really have any tips. The one and only one tip I could think of, is to cultivate good reading habit from young, so kids will find reading rather a fun routine they enjoy doing daily. Usually the only reason Renzo refuses to sleep on time at 9:30pm, is because he has not finished reading his books. He's currently on a routine called "5-A-Day-Books" which is widely adopted by many parents.  The idea is to have your kid pick any 5 books and repeatedly read them everyday for one whole week, and move on to next set of 5 books. We let Renzo pick anything he likes because he has already formed a routine of reading books with us before bedtime since he was 3. Before that, we were the one reading to him as he couldn't read on his own.

And recently Renzo has been very eager to improve his Chinese so his 5-A-Day-Books choice often includes 4 Chinese books and 1 English book only. And amazingly, he is improving! Of course I must give credits to his childcare teachers who have taught them hanyupinyin in K1, I know most pre-schools start that in K2 only. He's now able to read simple Chinese books independently.

Last night when we asked Renzo to pick his 5 books, instead of going straight to the bookshelf as what he always does, he suddenly said, "I am not sure, I do not know which ones to pick because I've read all these books already. I want to be smarter but I do not have many books to read!!". He's quite right because he really doesn't have a lot of books, so I've decided to get him some new books on his favorite Disney characters like Jake or Sophia. And I am sure I have the need to up his book collection immediately, because now Rynus didi seems to get more and more interested in this 5-A-Day-Books routine too!!