Conquering Comprehension

Most primary school students in Singapore will find "Comprehension" and "Composition" very challenging. To be honest, "Comprehension" is one area that my son loses a lot of marks in his school exam.

I have decided to coach him myself.   There are many good books out there. I chose this one because it was on sales when I went to Popular bookstore. This book teaches many good strategies, quite valuable actually.

I emphasised  on the following points:

(a) Underline the relevant parts in the passage:
At young age, kids tend to just write whatever they think is the answer.  So, the score is usually "whatsoever".  So, I insisted him to draw a line on where he thinks the answer should be.  This forces him to read and to consider the original passage. This makes him really answering the questions in details rather than simply write whatever in his brain.

In addition, if the same part of the passage will be used for 2 questions, I would ask him to think again. This prevents mistakes and lost of marks.

(b) Check that you have written enough:
Very often, the answers may have several parts. That's the reason more than 1 mark is allocated. Often, there are 2-3 lines allocated for the answers.  Kids just write one line with one part of the answer. Often marks will be missed. So, I asked him to consider again if he just wrote one line in the space having more than or equal to two lines.

(c) How not to miss?
I asked my son to read the sentences before and after the lines where he underlined, and considered the relevancy to the question. He should consider adding those if he has problem with (b) above. Also, I asked him to consider the reasoning.

(d) Go to the details!!!
Must always have patience , and dig deep to the details.  Do not generalise the answer.

(e) Practise! Practise! Practise!

It was quite painful with (e).  According to the teacher, kids may not fully develop yet at the age of P2-P3 and that they cannot cope. So, practise and patients are needed. I believe this had been painful remedy for my son. But outcome was fantastic.  His scores, improved from 2~5/10 to now, 9.5/10!  The score could have been 10/10 if not because of a minor careless mistake that he copied wrongly from the passage.

I  praise him for the good work. Now, I see a lot of self esteem and confidence in him in this section now. I believe that now he knows, HE CAN DO IT!