TEACHING A CHILD TO UNDERSTAND A TEXT. STEP ONE: READ A SENTENCE

For your child to learn to understand a text, you must first work with a single sentence: https://argoprep.com/blog/sbac-practice-test/. What does this mean? This means showing the child how to read out all the factual information from a sentence, that is, to teach him or her to understand what the sentence says explicitly, explicitly. And then to show that a single sentence can also contain subtextual information (something that is not explicitly said, but the reader guesses).

The following tasks are sui

table for children who can already read. They can be older preschoolers, first graders or older children.

1. Teach a child to deter

mine how many words are in a sentence, and to ask questions about these words. Pay attention to the fact that the question can be asked not to each word. For example, in the sentence “Nikita’s car with control” the words are 5 words, but the questions will be 3, because the prepositions of the U and C can not be asked: these words mean nothing, they help relate the words in a sentence. What kind of questions are these? 1) Who has a control car? 2) What does Nikita have? 3) What kind of car does Nikita have?

And in the sentence “Petya stopped at the crossing” you can ask questions to all words except the preposition Y (Who stopped at the crossing? What did Petya do? Where did Petya stop?), and these will be questions to factual information. You can also ask: Why did Petya stop at the crossing? This is a question for the subtextual information. There is no answer to this question in the sentence, but we can guess and assume: either the red traffic light was on, or, if there was no traffic light, Petya stopped because cars were driving on the road. Through this exercise we are gradually teaching the child to understand that a sentence has not only information that is given in a ready-made form, but also that which is hidden “between the lines,” and one must also be able to read it out.

2. Teach to pay attention to sight word unscramble the order of words and put the logical emphasis. For example, we give a sentence where the word order is obviously broken (Children took out albums and pencils.) And we suggest correcting it, interchanging the words so that the meaning of the sentence is clear. And then we ask the child to read the sentence several times, highlighting a different word each time in a voice (we teach them to put the logical accent). For example: CHILDREN took out albums and pencils. If we stress the word CHILDREN, it will answer what question? (WHO got the albums and pencils?). The children DID get the albums and pencils. And this is the answer to what question? (WHAT did the children do?), etc. Did you notice that by doing word order and logical emphasis, we are essentially continuing to teach questions to a sentence, but not directly, but through the answers.

3. We teach to see words in a sentence that are superfluous in meaning. For a child to find an extra word in a sentence, he must think about the meaning of the sentence and understand it. For example, in the sentence “The birds arrived and very began to build their nests,” the extra word is very. Why? The skill of asking word questions will help us here. The question began (how?) very has no sense: here clearly another word is needed (immediately, soon…), but it is not available, so the word VERY is superfluous, it should be removed.

4. We check how we have learned to read sentences: we do complex tasks. Such tasks assume that the child first makes a “scattered” sentence, eliminating the extra word, and then asks questions to all the independent words. For example, the words are given: on, strong, was, sea, storm, ship. You need to make a sentence excluding the extra word: There was a big storm at sea. Then determine, to which words you can ask a question. There are four such words (all except the preposition HA). We have four questions: What was at sea? Where was the storm? What kind of storm was there? What does it say about the big storm at sea?

Similar tasks can be invented a lot, just enough to pick up the appropriate sentences. They can always be found in children’s books.