Reading Comprehension Sample Test

As a retired teacher, I’m often asked about reading comprehension tests. Concerned parents want to know how their children are assessed at school. Instead of trying to explain reading comprehension, I’m providing you with a sample test question. First, the student would have to read a passage, and here’s one I made up:

Bobby and Joe are brothers. They live on a big farm and have lots of pets and animals, including dogs, cats, rabbits, cows, pigs, and horses. Bobby spends most of his free time with the horses. He loves riding them, grooming them, and feeding them. On the other hand, Joe really enjoys spending time with the dogs. Both of his dogs are very smart, and he’s taught them to perform many tricks.

Sample questions:

1. Bobby and Joe are:
   1. Best friends
   2. Brothers
   3. Cousins
   4. None of the above
2. Bobby and Joe have:
   1. Horses
   2. Chickens
   3. Sheep
   4. All of the above
3. Joe’s favorite animals seem to be:
   1. The pigs
   2. The cows
   3. The horses
   4. The dogs
4. Based on the paragraph, Bobby:
   1. Doesn’t like dogs
   2. Likes horses
   3. Doesn’t get along well with Joe
   4. All of the above

 This is just an example of a reading comprehension test, similar to ones that your child will be required to take during their elementary school years. Obviously, a test like this would be geared toward younger kids. Older kids will be presented with more difficult passages and questions that will require more advanced reading comprehension and more sophisticated reading skills.

Classroom Activities to Interest Children in Plants

One of the biggest challenges teachers face is getting their students interested in the subject they are focusing on  during lesson times. I have often wondered what might interest children in growing plants, and I decided to look further into the subject for myself. Kids often have very short attention spans, and it is important to quickly capture their attention. My proposed project was to get my school children interested in growing plants for themselves, so I went looking for a suitable article to inspire me with ideas. I was thrilled to discover exactly what I needed, the article called ‘Fun Classroom Activities to Interest Children / Kids in Growing Plants‘. This article was full of ideas that would excite any child and encourage them to give growing a go for themselves.

The article described such activities as growing  an avocado stone on a jar of water, or a bean in the side of a glass jar with blotting paper in. The kids at our school loved the ideas, and we had great fun trying them out.

On the same site I found quite a lot of fascinating and educational articles written by the same author, for example How to Grow your Child a Living Den or Playhouse. I thought this was another wonderful activity to get the children interested in growing, and making it into an adventure at the same time. There is no reason why a school with a garden area could not grow one or some of these living playhouses with the help of the children, and it is the kind of project that gives them real ‘hands on’ experience of growing plants and reaping rewards for their efforts.

We live in an age where vegetables are becoming more and more expensive to buy in the shops, as well as often having been shipped thousands of miles before they get to our supermarket shelves. Surely we should be encouraging our children to grow up wanting to grow their vegetables at home, not buy them in packets with no knowledge of where they came from or what has been sprayed on them. Apart from anything else it is far more environmentally friendly to reduce the carbon footprint our produce travelling thousands of miles leaves behind.

 

Using French Cuisine to teach French: crème brûlée

Total immersion would be the best way to learn French. In fact, it’s the best way to learn any language. But when total immersion is not a possibility, sometimes teaching French Cuisine is a good substitute.

Why? Because everybody likes to eat, and very many people like to cook. When the recipe for crème brûlée that you hand out to your class is entirely in French, and when they know that they will be expected to prepare crème brûlée as part of their participation in the course, suddenly they will pay attention to the French words in the recipe and to the grammar in which those words are couched in a whole new light. You see, when you actually need to understand something, you pay attention in a completely different way.

Divide your class into groups. Hand the same copy of the recipe to each group. Explain any difficult vocabulary items and any less well known grammatical construction to the class — once! Then let them watch a video of a famous French chef demonstrating in French how to prepare the crème brûlée.

Afterwards, each group will prepare their own crème brûlée, but another group will be asked to judge the resultant confection. That other group’s judgment will then figure into their grade. Teaching French by using French cuisine brings home to students the practical necessity of understanding what they read and hear in French.

For a link to the recipe and the video of how to make crème brûlée, click here.

 

Structural Linguistics

The first method of grammatical analysis that developed from the concept of the phoneme was structural linguistics. At present this approach is widely studied in colleges and universities and is taught in some secondary schools. A grammarian following the structural approach does not concern himself with words and their meanings, which cannot be readily and objectively measured, but concentrates on phonemes and on structure, which is the way units occur in sentences. Individual speech sounds, or phonemes, are built up into meaningful units of language, called morphemes. An example of a morpheme is hed, which is equivalent to the word “head.” However, if two morphemes are joined together, they constitute what structural grammarians call a phrase. For example, the morpheme hed plus the morpheme z, which is the sign of the plural, together constitute the phrase hedz, which is equivalent to the word “heads.”

Aside from analyzing the morphemes in a sentence, structural grammarians also take into account other factors that determine the sound pattern of a sentence. These factors include pitch (highness or lowness of sound), stress (degree of emphasis), and juncture (pauses between words or parts of words).

In structural grammar the parts of speech are defined by their function and position in the pattern of the sentence. For example, a noun is described as the kind of word that can serve as a subject and that is likely to end in an -s or -z sound in the plural or to have a particle like the, a, or an before it. Units like “the” and “forty” are called determiners, not adjectives, because they do not work in a sentence as do such adjectives as “red” and “noisy.” For similar reasons, words like “very” and “greatly” are called in-tensifiers, not adverbs.

Some new grammars are generative; that is, they describe the generation, or birth, of a sentence. These grammars analyze language in the process of being used rather than language that has already been used or written down. The first of such grammars to be developed is known as transformational grammar. This method consists of describing certain basic sentences, called kernel sentences, and then stating formulas by which these can be transformed into other types of sentences, called transforms. An example of a kernel sentence is “Girls studied.” Transforms of this kernel can include “The girls were studying” and “Were the girls studying?” Grammarians using the transformational approach have developed specific formulas for all the various forms that a sentence can take. Transformational grammar differs from structural grammar in its greater reliance on the meaning of words. It also relies more on words and less on morphemes.

Other new types of grammatical analysis include tagmemic grammar, which breaks up sentences into tagmemes, or natural parts, and string grammar, which puts emphasis on the morphemes as they are strung along in the sentence. At this time no one can predict which of these approaches, if any, will even tually become the standard grammatical description for modern English. However, they all illustrate that grammarians produce different descriptions of grammar, depending on the assumptions with which they begin.

The Letter A

A is the first letter of most European alphabets, including English.

It is derived through letters of the Latin and Etruscan alphabets from the Greek alpha, and the English capital A retains the Greek and Roman lapidary form. The Greeks, who learned the art of writing from the Phoenicians, borrowed this letter from the Semites. Indeed, whereas the Greek name is meaningless, the Semitic name, aleph, is a word in the Semitic languages meaning ‘ox’.

The modern letter A is of Etruscan origin. The small ‘a’, in both its forms, italic a and roman a, derives from the Caroline form (employed in the Frankish empire at the end of the 8th century), which in its turn descended from the semi-uncial book-hand.

The Venetian minusculae, nowadays known as italics (introduced in Florence in the 15th century), and the Roman type of letter (perfected in northern Italy, chiefly at Venice, where it was used in the printing presses about the end of the 15th century), were adopted in England, from Italy, in the 16th century. The black letter or Gothic, also developed from the Caroline (at the end of the 12th century), and employed in northwestern Europe, including England, until the 16th century, was still in general use in Germany until the late 1940s.

The Semitic aleph was (and still is, for instance, in Hebrew) a consonant, not a vowel. Its sound was that of a glottal stop or a neutral vowel, represented by the A as in aboard, aground, etc. The Greeks adopted the symbol to represent what is now the general Continental pronunciation of A, that is, an open vowel like that of father. In English spelling, A corresponds to any of seven or more vowel sounds, as in mat, mate, squad, water, father, allow, many; depending on the speaker’s accent, this list may also be supplemented by one or more of bad, cast, village, farm.

The expression ‘short A’ commonly refers in English to the vowel of mat, which is a front open unrounded monophthong; ‘long A’ refers to that of mate, a front unrounded mid-to-close diphthong. Words like cast, path vary regionally and socially between ‘short A’ and the ‘broad A’ of father, a central or back unrounded open monophthong.

Living with Boys

For a mom, the hardest thing about raising boys is that you never were one yourself. We girls fundamentally understand each other. On the whole, we love pretty things that are well decorated. We don’t like to get dirty, we like to sit quietly by ourselves, or chat forever with a group of friends. But boys! Boys like to run wild, get dirty, play with weapons and pretend to kill each other. If they accidentally get hurt, they show it off like a trophy.

 

Boys do not seem able to eat such food as grapes, raisins, nuts, or candy simply by taking them from a dish and putting them into their mouths. Instead, they must launch them high above their head and expect them to land in their mouth. If it drops to the ground, it is retrieved and the process repeats itself. The only exception is if a brother is nearby, in which case it is thrown in the direction of the brother and caught in his mouth.

 

I spent my childhood with a stroller and a doll. I had a toy washer and ironing board. I would play by washing my doll’s clothes and ironing them with an iron that never got hot.

 

My three boys spent their childhood as Superman, Batman and Robin. They were Superheroes who saved the world from the bad guys who must be shot and killed. They annihilated anything that came in their way. Amongst themselves, they fought for superior position and were competitive about everything. Wherever we went and whatever we did, it was a race. There was a winner and a loser.

Read Homeschooling Boys on Kindle

Read Homeschooling Boys on Nook

Learn About the Universe in an iPhone RPG

What does an iPhone RPG have to do with learning about the universe.  Lets face it, no matter how many times we see the words ‘game’ and ‘education’ tied toegther, the end product is going to be pretty bland.

I was therefore a little surprised to find a game called Traveller-AR which not only provided a hugely entertaining MMORPG, but it also lets you learn a few little facts about the solar system, and how the universe works.

Traveller-AR stops being bland in one major way. Simply put, the game does not try and MAKE you learn.  You don’t have to answer questions about the universe to proceed or anything like that. Instead Traveller-AR simple contains information about the universe, with which it will expose players to all the facts and figures, immersing them in education, but not drowning them in it.

This non invasiving learning environment will give anybody a good ground knowledge in the universe, and how it works.  Though you will not learn anywhere near as much as you would by reading a book, Traveller-AR will instead provide a more passive learning experience, perfect for those who have trouble concentrating on lists of facts.

by finding out more in a hands on game, you will learn, without being lectured!