"Filipino" at Play

I was having difficulty teaching my daughter Filipino because of her limited Filipino vocabulary. She was initially taught to name things in English, read books in English and talk in English. Her Filipino language is just catching up now. She gets easily frustrated with words in Filipino that she doesn't know.

We we're discussing PANGNGALAN this time. I intentionally finished discussing with her NOUNS a week ago so we could go through the present topic and see the equivalent term in English. Still she was kind of bored, simply because the medium of instruction was in Filipino.

Time to change gears. I made board game (sort of) out of a white cartolina. Drew some circles and wrote tao, bagay, hayop, lugar, pangyayari. There were lines connecting the circles indicating the next space we can jump into. I wrote some words in a piece of paper folded it so we can't see what's written. This serves as our word bank. The object of the game is to identify each PANGNGALAN. We start at the bottom with a box that says SIMULA then we work our way up to the box that say PANALO. Whoever reaches the top box first wins the game. We pick words from the word bank then identify each word. We check the board if there's a circle that corresponds to our PANGNGALAN that is connected to where our token is. If there is then we jump to that space, if there is none then we simply stay where we are and wait for the next turn. for our tokens, we just choose anything around us that fits the circle. We chose our erasers. :D

Immediately, my daughter got the hang of it. It was amazing to see her face light up after winning the first round. She then said, "one more!" We got daddy to join in as well. The second time around, she won again. And then again she wanted to play more. Although there were words that she was not familiar with in the word bank, she was not frustrated anymore. She's now eager to know now what that word is because she wanted to know if she has a "move" on the board. Two days after, she still wants to play the game. Talk about enthusiasm!

It was like I won a prize that day. The change in her attitude towards the lesson was so big. I was so happy and proud that I was able to think of something that can tickle her mind and get her motivated. It's an AHA moment for me. Next time she feels bored and inattentive, I know now what to do!!! YIPEE!!!