Colour Your World

Date: 22 July 2006
Class: IIB
Attendance: 8/9

The children carried on with the colouring of their drawings of animals from last week. Those who had completed their colouring were given simple handout comprising a puzzle and a P2 english sentence matching exercise.

As planned, I decided to break the children into two groups. S, R, WR, YX were coached by me while K helped to take care of LM, C, NZ and J. Z was not here today. We got the children to read the book in turns this round as compared to the normal class story reading session to break up the monotony and to give the children a chance to read.

My group had only 1 good reader while the others needed more coaching. What touched me today was S's performance. She is a delightful child, full of smiles and very fun loving. Her favourite thing in kidsREAD is not reading but drawing on the whyteboard when she has the chance! Today was different, I coached her a little more intensively on her reading while alternating with the 3 boys and found she actually tried very hard to read although some of the words were beyond her. Her weak vocabulary means that she needs plenty of coaching for polysyllabic words. I could detect the interest in her to learn if it was made interesting to her!

While reading the book, I corrected their pronunciation and tried to inject life into the passages by varying my voice for the bits of dialogue in the story. It's a bit of a challenge to get them to read the story with life since getting them to read the sentences without a mistake was a big achievement at their level (Primary 1).

Once we were done with the book, I got them to do a simple spelling exercise based on the words found in the book. Interestingly enough, S was quite enthusiastic and even wanted more words to spell once we were done with the initial 5 words. That really motivated me to try to give her even more attention as I think she is starting to show more interest in kidsREAD.

The volunteer-student ratio in my class now is 9:2 with the help of K. Thanks K for going an additional hour beyond the 10.30 am class! I will approach HM to see if I can wrangle 1/2 of the JC students to help in my class!

Volunteering in kidsREAD surprises me each session with something new I learn about myself or the children. I leave you with this poem!