How to start teaching your child English at home

Every parent can start teaching English at home: not only parents who speak English well, but also those who don’t speak it at all.

Your English doesn’t matter

Even if you don’t know English, you can teach your child with CALP. Just become your child’s partner in learning; your involvement keeps them engaged. At the start, focus on only two things: listening and vocabulary. Children need time to absorb a language. Spend enough time with them, and they start speaking English within a few months.

Set a routine

Spend 15 minutes a day with your child, and slowly increase it to an hour. Keep to the time strictly.

Fix the activities as well as the time. When the order is always the same, you don’t need to explain anything. For example: play the Listen video first, then the repeat-after-me version of the same chapter. When you both know a new word, start using it in conversation at home. Use stories at bedtime and poems in the morning. Find ways to bring English words into daily life.

Use stories

Young children love stories, bright colours and pictures, and CALP’s story videos have all three. Choose any that suit your child’s level. Seeing a picture while hearing a word helps a child connect the two, and listening to stories gets them used to the sound of English.

Use songs

Children love to sing, which makes songs a great way to learn new words and improve pronunciation. Songs are also a chance to dance, so children who can’t sing yet can still join in.

Play games

Learning shouldn’t be boring. Flashcards, crosswords, picture pairs and memory games are good ways to practise words.

Where to start

NCERT’s English books follow the National Curriculum Framework and are enough to build age-appropriate English. That is why CALP is built around the NCERT syllabus. Start with your child’s class on our YouTube channel.

Speak English at home

Start saying these in English at home:

• Numbers
• Colours
• Describing words: big, small, tall, happy, sad, tired
• Body parts
• Toys
• Clothes
• Animals: pets, farm animals, wild animals
• Food and vegetables

Remember

Learning should be fun for children. Don’t make it a burden for yourself or your child, and don’t worry too much about whether they are learning yet. Spend the time with them, and keep it fun.