Word Fun at Dinner

Our time together wasn't wasted — even if it didn't look much like learning.

After school, the five of us had a narrow window: three o'clock until bedtime, packed with homework, dinner, dishes, and whatever else the day had left over. Sitting side by side at a desk, working through books the way we might during the holidays — that wasn't going to happen. But the children were getting on with what they could manage on their own, steadily and without much fuss.
After Min's last parent-teacher meeting, I'd been turning over a particular problem. Her biggest challenge, the teacher said, was vocabulary — and Min has never been one for straight memorisation. Drilling word lists wasn't going to help her. I wasn't sure what would.

Then one evening, sitting around the dinner table, I tried something. Simple enough that Jin — who had just started learning her alphabet and phonics — could join in.

"Give me 5 words that start with E!"

The children blinked. A hint, then.

"Hyun's favourite food." — EGG! "Hyun's favourite animal." — Elephant! "Something on your face." — Eye! Ear! "A purple vegetable — starts with the word we already found." — Eggplant!!!

Next: seven words ending in T. They hesitated.

"Meow," I said.

Cat! And then, almost automatically — Hat! Bat! Rat! Mat! — all three of them, falling over each other. We laughed. Min took her turn and raised the stakes: three words, starting with T, more than seven letters each. Temperature. Tornado. Treasure.

They learned while the dinner was still warm, while the plates were being cleared, while someone was negotiating a last bite of dessert. No preparation, no marking, no patience required. They set each other questions. Even the person asking often couldn't answer — so everyone would sit and think together.

Our home learning survived. Just not the way I'd planned it.