first assessment for little Renzo - I CAN READ

The highlight of the past busy weekend, was an assessment I scheduled for Renzo at I CAN READ school, to understand how's his progress in terms of reading, or simply put, to test his English skill.

We arrived at the school on time at 2:30pm and this lovely teacher who's going to conduct the assessment, was already standing at the door and waiting for Renzo. Daddy decided to let Mummy go in with Renzo since Mummy is always more concerned about Renzo's learning progress.

The assessment lasted for about 20 minutes or so. The teacher first asked Renzo about his name, his age, his school and his class, and lastly he was asked if he knows when is his birthday, which according to the teacher, not many kids could answer. The only thing he could not answer, is "which year were you born?", and the teacher jokingly commented, no answer is better than an answer of "a year of rooster, or dragon" that she got from most of the kids she assessed. And Renzo didn't seem to be disturbed by the teacher's strong Australian accent, he could understand and converse well.

Then she went on to flash a full page of items, there are 27 of them, and Renzo could recognize 26 of them (except for the word "witch" which we have never introduced to his vocabulary), and when he recognized "igloo", the teacher looked pleasantly surprised.

She then went on to test Renzo the first sound of all those 27 items, he got them 100% right.

The next page of questions are very repetitive, he has to read the letters from A - Z, and tell the teacher what sound does these letters make, and in my opinion, these questions either make the kids more confident, or bored. For Renzo's case, I guess he was a little bored.. LOL..

He was then tested on a handful of letters and their sounds randomly, again, not a challenge to this little 4 years old who grew up with Leapfrog..

Next he was asked to read a whole list of words, from simple ones like "THE", "ONE", to slightly tougher ones like "COUGH", "THOROUGH", Renzo did not complete that test as he was already exhausted (probably from the morning dip in the pool and 1 hour of piano class) and couldn't focus well. I noticed when he wasn't sure about his answer, the moment the teacher questioned, "Do you know that?", he will shake his head without any further attempt to figure it out. So if you are coaching your kid to read at home, boosting their confidence level is definitely the key! It doesn't matter if they could not pronounce correctly but try not to ask this kind of closed-ended questions, because it's very easy for them to give up trying and say no. Some of these words here, he could definitely read if they were put into a context of a story. So I strongly believe that Renzo reads mainly by sight words, his strong phonic foundation helps but it's not all about phonics, when they are not trained with a proper system on how to read, breaking down the words or relating them to something they know, is the way most people learn to read. For example, if they know how to read "rice", most likely they will figure out words like "price", "thrice"..

The last part of the assessment, was a short paragraph and a long paragraph for him to read, he finished 2/3 of the short one and we had to stop there as he didn't wish to continue anymore. Then the teacher proceeded on with the pronunciation of "ch", "sh" and "th", it was a breeze for him and he told me he learned all from his Leapfrog although I always thought he wasn't paying much attention to that disc which teaches blending of 2 letters like these. Lastly he was tested on the first sound, last sound and middle sound of words like "elephant", "fish", "hen", etc, I heard that kids usually struggle with middle sounds, but I bet Renzo's ability to recognize middle sounds, must be the clincher for the teacher to decide which class he's qualified to attend at the end.

Renzo looked absolutely ecstatic when I told him that the assessment is over and as promised, he can go and eat his chocolate icecream!

Back to the assessment result, the teacher had only one thing to say: " Mom, wow, I have to consult my senior colleague and come back to you again.."

So we waited for another couple of minutes before the teacher re-entered the room, and shared this programmes recommendation chart with us. According to her, Renzo is ready to take I CAN READ Programme straight away, but problem is, that is a 1.5 hours lesson and he will be sitting in with another 6-7 kids who are definitely older than him, but some might not be able to read this well like him. For his age, it's hard to handle that. But if they were to put him at one level lower, which is the ICR Preliminary program, he will get bored easily so the best recommendation she could suggest, is to start him on the I CAN READ Programme but get him a one on one teacher, so that he could have one hour of lesson catered to him based on his pace, with the teacher's full attention. But such lessons cost around 80 dollars per hour and are only conducted during weekday afternoons, apparently we just couldn't afford to send Renzo for it.

I looked through the I CAN READ textbooks and I do love their system, their teachers (or at least the one who did assessment for Renzo), and most importantly, it addresses my concern about spelling, which I have no clue about how to teach Renzo at all. Daddy is never in favor of enrolling Renzo to any kind of enrichment class for now, he even thought the assessment questions are like "What is your favorite color?" kind. So we both agreed that Renzo's skill of reading based on phonics or breaking down the words, definitely requires reinforcement, but whether to reinforce by sending him for an enrichment lesson at I CAN READ or not, we will probably wait for another year to figure out..