Then the teacher sat with us last 15 mins and ran through the 3 months of work that they did at school. It was nice to know how much they knew each other and how she got Prisha to admit her strengths and weaknesses. We came to know she has been pulled out from IEP and just has a teacher come in for 45 mins daily to help in the main period of inquiry. Then a teacher takes her out for some time daily to work on her narration and comprehension skills. Prisha is a star at reading, spellings and hand writings is good. She needs to work on her comprehension. We need to all work on that front now.
Today I was conversing with a friend who had a hearing impaired child and is from the US. She made a statement which made me think the same too. When I explained how Prisha reads well but is not able to comprehend it in her mind. Her observation was that the child is so focused on reading it right and doing it to her best that her brain is very focused on that and is not working enough on comprehending it. It just struck a chord in me. Now we need to change our strategy. We read to her, explain where is necessary and then ask her to explain in her own words. So while we read and explain it would be easy for her to build the picture in her mind of the story, hold it in her brain better and then be able to retell in her own words.She could then read the story by herself to get it even better. Hope this works better. Each day is a new journey and new learning with her.
I love the idea of the child-led conference! Here, we have parent-teacher conferences, but the child is not directly involved in any way. I like the method in Germany, where Prisha is able to lead you through her classroom activities. What a great idea!
ReplyDeleteThat is interesting about the reading and comprehension. We see the same thing with Nolan, though on a much younger scale. He cannot read yet, of course, but he has trouble remembering words. If you show him a picture of a castle, he cannot come up with the word "castle" - he'll just say "big house" or some other common word that he knows. But if you ask him to point to the picture of a castle, he'll get it right.
It is like he cannot process words well enough to think of them on his own, but he understands the word when it is spoken to him... just an interesting thing. We are working on this, because a recent test showed that he was only able to identify 30% of common nouns he should have at the age of four. Ugh!
Pretty good observation.
ReplyDeleteMeera is 3.5 years and can read level one books. I dont know how she will use comprehension.
I do remember watching alka teach one video were she is asking kids to describe a picture. Where she says "its big green grassy field.... far away there is a river... there are horses on the field....
I like that video as in that she explains how to encourage child to talk, help them to increase there vocabulary, use correct sentence structure....