Tips for comprehension and vocab

I just received some questions from a student about comprehension and vocab so here are the short tips I gave him:

Q I have a hard time with authors purpose and compare this to that.

A Do you have a list of possible answers ie persuasion, explanation, humor? A list is helpful because you can talk about it with a friend and act the common ones out so they stick in your mind better. With compare/contrast type questions be sure you know you'res looking for 'same as' and 'different' (and key words are words like "likewise" and "similarly", and "by contrast". When I teach this I usually say really simple things like, “I am wearing pants and similarly you are” or “I’m short, by contrast, you’re tall” and I get my student to say some of his own examples (real easy ones) and we act them out where we can (sitting/standing, in/out).

Q My knowledge of vocab words is also really low

A Vocab can be hard because you want to discover new words naturally but how often do we really consider vocab except in school books? I usually start thinking about vocab by discussing the advantage of having good vocab ie when you know big words you look smart! Then we find words we don’t know and want to know, practice spelling them, thinking up any handy ways of remembering them, then using them in sentences (orally). Then we pick the hardest 5 to save. I have students explain them again and write them out again . They take them with them, or I keep them, and we review them next session. Oh, and any novel ways you can think of to remember them, the better. Acting out is good, also drawing things in and around the word and thinking of your own experiences or people the word describes ie My mom’s frugal!. When you spell the word, look out for tricky syllables and highlight them, eg in/CES/sant.

Q If the teacher says turn to page 263 in your book, read to page 266 and do problems 1-5...I can't remember it all.

A A quick review of note taking would help you. In this example you would jot down something like:

Pg 263

2 266

pr 1-5

You might have fun thinking up your own creative/bizarre/artistic shorthand.

Dyslexia - How does it feel?

It's summer vacation, and my family is pretty new to the area, so today we went exploring. I'm driving the car and my daughter is navigating: -M is for me, D is for my daughter.

D- "Oh God Mom, I'm so bad at this, who knows where we'll end up? We've got plenty of gas haven't we?"

M- "You'll be fine, you'll soon get the hang of it."

M- "Harvey St, do you see it?. We're on Main and we just crossed Harvey."

D- "No."

M- "OK, Kelley, do you see Kelley?"

D- "Nope."

M-"Rowley?"

D- "No."

M-"What about Maple, we're crossing Maple, it's a big one, it MUST be there."

D- "It's not here, none of them are here! And the stupid page splits just where I need to see the road and of course there's this big box obliterating just about anything worth seeing."

M- "South, honey, we're going South. Are you sure you're not looking North?"

D- "Oh, THAT South, well would you look at that! Rowley did you say? Yup, it's here now. -Mom, can you imagine how hard this would be if I had dyslexia on top of how difficult this already is?"

And of course I don't suppose I could really image it at all. I help people with dyslexia every day but I'm not dyslexic and am always moved anew by the personal accounts my students give me. They say things like, " It's incredibly frustrating. I can read fine but my writing looks like a small kids. I can't spot my mistakes and then when someone points them out to me they seem so obvious and basic." "I make a joke of my dyslexia because I have to. My kids help me out a lot when I have to write something." "I hated school because I couldn't keep up with the books but I got along by being smart in other ways. I couldn't read or write much but I'm a great talker. When I left I even got a job delivering mail. I memorized names and street codes, I amazed even myself."

Dyslexia. How does it feel?