Helping Your Child Start English at Home
A no-pressure routine for parents: ten minutes a day, games not drills, and what to skip entirely.
- Step 1
Start with things you can point at
Skip band one entirely for young kids. Function words like 'of' and 'would' mean nothing to a seven-year-old. Start with bands 3 and 6: door, table, dog, apple, milk. Words with pictures attached stick to children fast, and pointing at the real object while saying the word is the whole method.
- Step 2
Ten minutes, then stop while it's fun
The goal of month one is not vocabulary. It is your child thinking English time is fun time. Ten minutes of flashcards as a guessing game, with the listen button as a 'talking computer', then stop, even if they want more. Especially if they want more. Appetite carried to tomorrow is worth more than ten extra words today.
- Step 3
Let them beat you
Play the quiz together and be beatably slow. A child who wins against a parent at English wants to play again tomorrow; a child who gets corrected all session does not. Save corrections for one pattern at a time, praise loud guesses, and treat wrong answers as funny, not as errors.
- Step 4
Sound before spelling, always
Children build languages from the ear. Use the audio on every card, sing the words in silly voices, and do not push writing for the first months. A child who can say and understand 200 words has real English; spelling can catch up later through reading, the way it does for native kids.