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DadDude
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« Reply #2 on: November 07, 2011, 11:37:02 PM » |
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I do some of what Tanikit does too--sometimes I ask H. what something means, or why someone said/did something, etc. Such questions mainly tell me whether he's paying attention, or in some cases if the text is too difficult. He reads an hour a day by himself, and after that I usually ask at least a few, sometimes many questions about what he's read. With fiction, sometimes I ask him to tell me what happened in the story. If you just bear in mind that you can ask some questions, plenty will occur to you.
The other thing I do is to explain every word, phrase, or name we come across with a definition, sometimes an example, and not infrequently we look up pronunciations (especially in history and geography) and look for pictures and videos online. Although this multimedia might sound like "gravy" or "enrichment," I think it's just basic comprehension--if you don't have the slighted idea of what the Buddhist cliff monasteries of India might look like, you can't do without a picture. Without one, you really won't have nearly as good an idea of what the text is talking about.
Frankly, though, I think the notion of "reading comprehension" as a separate facility, as a subject as it were, has been more or less invented by schools which have to test whether the children have done the reading. If you're a school teacher, it's a bad idea simply to trust that the children have done the reading, because the reading is frequently boring to a lot of the kids (that's no fault of their own) and they won't do it if they don't feel they have to. How can you "make" a child do the reading? Have reading comprehension homework or a quiz. Does this significantly help the child to learn stuff? Marginally, I'm sure. If the student could be guaranteed to have done the reading without the homework or quiz, would the time be better spent doing more reading? I think so. Would H. learn to "comprehend" the text more if he did homework or quizzes, or if my oral questions afterward were more high-pressure? I don't think so. What gives him the ability to comprehend the text is (1) attention, and (2) knowing the meaning of the words. I don't think that comprehension homework & quizzes would improve those, at this point anyway. So this is why I don't spend time on that stuff.
We go through the Story of the World quiz book (just finished the Vol. 1 quizzes) orally over meals. This isn't to test his knowledge but to review the salient facts, and because it's kind of fun if there's no pressure at all.
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