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how to help child with inaccurate narrations
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My 4th grader is having trouble with accuracy in her narrations (primarily Story of the World 4, Child’s Geography of the World, and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood). I suspect this might be partially due to her habit of sort of skimming over words she doesn’t know how to pronounce. She reads well above grade level and has good comprehension, but getting her to sound out a new word is very difficult. She’ll guess, read sounds/letters that aren’t there, read the wrong sound even when I tell her what the sound should be, and generally make the whole thing an ordeal. I don’t know how to get her to stop doing this. It’s not stubbornness, but more an unwillingness to engage her brain and just sound the thing out.
And I don’t think this is the only reason that she isn’t accurate. I suspect she just isn’t paying as much attention as she should when she’s reading. Is there a fairly SIMPLE way to encourage accuracy? Because being really honest, if getting her to be more accurate is going to require me to have her narrate after every page of, say, a book’s 5-8 page assignment (which is all I can think of to help her do a better job), it’s unlikely to actually happen.
Had to laugh at your honesty at the end. Yes, that is the first thing that came to mind – have her narrate after every paragraph or page (find that sweet spot that works for her).
Other ideas:
1. Read it aloud to her. Does she do better then? Again, I would read it in shorter sections if needed. This is especially good as she is not a strong reader.
2. Have her read it aloud to you or a stuffed animal – does it help her recall more? Some people just don’t retain as much when reading on their own.
3. Do something in between the two. Have her read a page to you then narrate, you read the next page to her and she narrates, back and forth. This way she is getting better with reading aloud (and reading in general) and if you have two copies handy she can follow along when you read or you can follow along when she reads too.
4. Do Less. If she can’t narrate after 5-8 pages then accept that. Cut assignments for each day to what she CAN handle. And do fewer books this year. It won’t be the end of the world! Better that she understand and can narrate what she is reading and go through less than read more but not retain any of it.
For word attack skills, I used the last part of Reading Reflex. When my ds was older, we used an SAT prep cookbook, Cooking for the SATS, or something like that was the title. I had him sound out the big words as well as be exposed to the vocabulary terms.
We’re still struggling with this. After a few weeks of having her read Story of the World 4 out loud, she’s paying a lot more attention to how she pronounces things, and her narrations have been more accurate. But she tends to leave out place names and often people’s names. For example, yesterday she narrated from SOTW and the only name in it was Andrew Carnegie, and she didn’t remember it. Today she narrated from a chapter of Child’s Geography of the World on California and she didn’t remember the names of any of the places mentioned. What do I do about this?
I pick a few names and places to write on our dry-erase board. We are currently using Famous Men, which has lots of names and places in each chapter, so I just pick a few to focus on. They can refer to the board when they are doing their narrations. We often look at a map before we start the reading, and I show them where the reading takes place. We may look at the map during the reading as well if several places are mentioned.
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