Comprehension...

During Winkie's Parent Teacher conference, that hallowed event that takes place once a year, giving us a window into the 7 weekday hours of his life and his thoughts, among all the other encouraging things we learned about him, we learned one important thing. That good reader as he was, he was having trouble with his comprehension. He wasn't retaining much after reading through a book, and his standard response for feedback about the book was an I don't know. I could totally relate to his teacher when she said that, because we were hitting that same brick wall at home as well. In fact, I had also been wondering about why he wasn't too interested in reading books to himself, though always ready to listen when I read to him. I had put it off to a certain laziness on his part, but poor comprehension skills were a whole different angle to it, and one that made sense.

And I realised we would have to do something about it to help him. For what is the point of reading if you cannot understand what you are reading? It was also necessary to shake some of that laziness off of him and the next day I got out a little ruled notebook. The idea of trying something new sometimes piques his interest and this time it did, especially when I asked him to write a label for his book.....'Comprehension Notebook' it said.

And that's how we started. We do comprehensions 3-4 times a week. He gets to choose the book we want to do this exercise on, and once we have read it, either together or him solo, I open a fresh page of the book, write the title and author and date, and list out all the questions that seem uppermost in my mind. Along the way, he has learnt a lot about how to go about a comprehension exercise and the need to write in full sentences and not convenient monosyllables. :) And the need to add details, rather than present just a curt answer. We've come a long way in just 4 comprehension exercises and while most of the questions are about memory recalls and attention to the finer points of the story, one question, the last one, is always about his feelings about the book and the story. What did he make of this? How did he feel about that? What was his favorite part? How did it inspire him?

At the end of which he knows better, how to dig into his thoughts, extract and present them in a way that I can understand, and oh...he now knows what inspire means. Both of which are great things, don't you think? :)