Preparing Your Child For Primary 1 English

_Part 1: Reading for Understanding _

Balloting fever is officially over, and you can finally rejoice now that your little champ has secured a place in a Primary school! The next big question is how to prepare your child/children for quite possibly the most important milestone in his/her life?

To give you an insight into what they can expect out of this transition and to ease some of the uncertainties plaguing this process, Ms Esther Leng, Academic Programme Director (Primary and Secondary), shares some useful tips.

One of the keystones of success in primary school English is reading, not just sounding out words but understanding and processing the information. This foundational skill supports your child in their learning in all subjects and especially so for the Comprehension Open-Ended component in the English paper all the way into higher education.

Read Together and Read Widely

Depending on where your child is in this, reading could be an activity that is done together or independently. It is important to remember that especially at this point when examinations are not the main concern, it is about inculcating the love for reading by modelling reading in the first place— a child is more likely to read if a parent reads. And a child is more likely to enjoy a reading if both parent and child read the same book together.

At English Ninjas, we have a vast library of books that spans across the many different genres. We often share with the children some of the stories that we have read and what are some of the reasons why we love them. We explain the plots and talk about the characters so as to pique their interests and get them to think about some of these aspects. We also encourage them to share about the books they have read and what they liked and disliked about those books.

Engage With The Text

Asking children questions about what they read also gets them to engage with the information. Start with basic questions like “What time of the day do you think it is?” and progress to inferential questions like “Why do you think the character was sad?” or “What do you think will happen next?”

From this, the children learn how to think about what they read and to respond to the texts. When a child reads a book for entertainment, there is no deliberate process of drawing out vocabulary and storyline. However, if we engage our children in a storybook together, we are also able to point out the various language use and help them read and understand the words they have difficulty with.