Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Teaching Filipino using Visible thinking routines

I told myself at the start of the year to be more intentional in teaching our kids my language and culture. Teaching them through songs is one approach that I have been using and have added some new Tagalog songs but it still feels like they are missing on the essence of the language because they are memorizing more the lines than what it means.

This made me reflect on what we normally say to the kids and an "ahuh!" moment occurred when I realized that I should be teaching them the daily questions/prompts that we use in our daily conversations. I am a big advocate making thinking visible at home and given the fact that we use these thinking routines/lines regularly then it is a good way in introducing them Filipino words and phrases. Here's a list of questions we normally ask  and how it's translated in Filipino:

a) What are you thinking? Ano ang iniisip mo?
b) Why did you say that? Bakit mo yan nasabi?
c) What if....? Paano kung?
d) What similarities/differences do you see? Ano ang nakikita mong pagkakahawig/pagkakaiba?
e) What else can you do? Ano pa ang puede mong gawin?
f) What's next? Ano ang susunod?
g) What got you happy (change to other emotions) today? Ano ang kinasaya mo sa araw na ito?
h) How did you feel? Ano ang naramdaman mo?
i) Why do you like (don't like) it? Bakit ayaw mo?
j)  What do you think others feel? Ano sa tingin mo naramdaman ng iba?

Some of these questions I wrote in my article for International Almere on Introspection. I am hoping that by teaching children to think about their thinking in another language, it  will elicit more understanding for our kids than teaching them basic concepts like colors, shapes or numbers.Let's see how the year unfolds with this technique!




3 comments:

  1. Thanks so much for participating in the blogging carnival. Good luck in meeting your goals.

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  2. Lynn, It was my pleasure and will keep you updated on how it goes :)

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  3. This is very interesting. I have a very good friend from ilo ilo though she spoke a lot of tagalog around my kids depending on who was around. It's nice to see the language again. More importantly though, I'd love to read more about how you make the thinking more visible at home!

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