Hi Josh,
Being aware of your previous posts, and seeing the word 'urgent' in your heading (along with listed concerns) left me wondering if you are expecting too much of your daughter? Such a potentially dogmatic approach runs the risk of turning her off prep.
Thinking about reading I guess it depends on how you think your daughter should respond to the daily opportunity to read? Perhaps consider abandoning the daily task of looking up words in dictionaries (we did as it seemed to not be helpful)-sounds rather uneventful for a young child, particularly after a day at school. Maybe let her read and seek out other sources to widen her vocabulary-vocabulary is a slow process. Maybe consider regular shared reading of a classic text.
Guess you also might like to consider your daughters age and the validity of your perceptions of her educational needs. Make sure she has plenty of free time and opportunities to live and do things that interest her outside of 11+ prep.
josh2017 wrote:
Hello All,
Hope you have been enjoying snow this weekend and are all set for the festivities.
We need help in preparation for Colchester for my DD. My DD is an ok reader but we have to say her daily to read, it's not like she does not like reading as when she starts a book she does tell's us how the plot is building and shows interest till the book is finished.
Our approach has been that she marks new words per day (2-5 max) and then to understand their meaning and how they can be used in sentences/paragraphs which we are planning to ask her to write a paragraph every week incorporating words from her weekly list.
We are ourself not native english speakers and struggle a lot with grammar and vocabulary is not that rich. What is your suggestion in terms of preparing for these exams. I have got some ideas in mind which I will like your inputs please.
1. Daily reading - 1/2 hr - 1 hr or as much as she enjoys
2-5 new words and their meanings from dictionary - antonyms, synonyms , sentences/paragraphs
What approach do you suggest to help her use these words or be able to remember later?
2. Comprehension practise - We are using Bond papers
I am finding bonds ok but will like to know any other books which could be better ?
3. Creative writing
We have not started heavily on this yet, we asked her to try some piece about her experience at a leisure park, there are quite a few punctuations, grammer mistakes, how shall we address those ?
4. Puncutation & Grammer - what is your approach, recommended books/practise sets ?
Many thanks in advance for your response.
rgds,
Josh