Starting with the Godson

The Godson, Donny (not his real name), is now 5+, going on 6 at the end of the year. He is currently in his 2nd year of Kindergarten.

He comes from a not so well-to-do background... parents are not superbly educated, and find managing their finances a great challenge. As a result, his education has been of a sub-standard level. From the time he was little, he was looked after by a nanny - an elderly lady who is not very educated and speaks only Chinese. He only started attending Childcare a while back, and even then his learning can be described as slow at best.

His teachers complain that the child writes badly - that is, his handwriting is atrocious and very untidy. His letter formation is also weak. He is falling behind in terms of reading and spelling... a situation made worse by the lack of intelligent conversation (as opposed to very functional interaction between caregiver and child, mostly consisting of instructions and scolding) outside of school.

So when I learnt about his situation, I volunteered to go to his house once a week, seeing as to how his home is near my in-law's place... and I've since had 2 lessons with him... the pace is slow. The child is unused to speaking good English, and so, the sounds are so unfamiliar. It takes a great deal of effort to curl his tongue around the sounds and produce a halfway decent sound.

An initial informal assessment shows a child who is unable to blend, and does not seem to have any notion of blending, despite having been in Kindergarten 1 last year. He doesn't know many of the basic sounds of the vowels and consonants. The words that he read successfully, he recognised by sight, not the results of phonemic awareness. He cannot consistently differentiate between a capital letter and a small letter (or uppercase and lowercase letter). His letter formation is awkward, and has to be re-taught.

So in the first lesson, we started on just the first 4 sounds in the OG scope and sequence, developed by Ron Y... and did another 4 in the second lesson. I also incorporated handwriting, as well as some blending and reading using the cards. To motivate and encourage practice, I got him to make his own set of sound cards... he possesses 8 so far. He picked up the keywords readily enough, although he struggled with "wagon", not having seen one in Singapore. But it's a start.

He also picked up the notion of the "headline", "belt-line" and "foot-line" readily enough, although it looked like he might have learnt some of it in school. So we plod along. Progress is slow, in part due to the only-once-a-week lessons, in part due to the fact that there is little home support.