Understanding – Mon 19th Jan 2015
By Jeannette | January 19, 2015
I’ve mentioned before how D preferred to learn to read via memorising words rather than phonetically, it’s something that just happened (albeit with the aid of a Vtech Storio). She has come along in leaps and bounds and, as with T, would much prefer to choose a new book when we’re in town – as opposed to a toy, which would be looked at and then discarded because “play” doesn’t come naturally to D.
But, I’ve always had a concern as to whether she understands what she’s reading, primarily because she’ll never want to “chat” about the story, it’s as if “well, I’ve done my reading for today, let’s put that aside and move on. Job done.”
We had a rather lovely moment or two today, which has gone a long way to alleviate my concerns above.
The first came with her Minecraft book – which she is never without – it’s packed full of screenshots and pictures and she carries it with her from getting up to bedtime at weekends, carrying it on the school run and putting it in her bag just before she goes to class on schooldays.
Occasionally she’ll stumble across a word she hasn’t seen before, ask me what it is and then it seems to be logged into her memory for future reading.
Today she came across the word “independent”, asked me what it was and then said “does that mean doing things on your own?”
Well done D!
The second fab moment came when we were looking up the weather forecast on the computer. D is desperate for it to snow, just enough for a snowman, but we’ve had zilch, not even frosts.
We decided to see if snow was forecast (no) and then we found some graphs with number of rainy days per month and other info.
She became very interested and was able to answer questions like “which month had the most sunshine/rain”, from the graph, which was amazing.
We then looked at the % chance of rain/snow and D answered my questions around which days had the lowest chance of rain/snow or precipitation as they called it.
A lovely five minutes or so of understanding and, once again, proving that she’s come a long way from that girl who was too overwhelmed by a mainstream environment to learn anything.
Definitely one for Small Steps Amazing Achievements.
I hope everyone’s day has gone well Jx
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