Week 41 Progress

Raiyan’s programme for the past week has been really tough so whenever in the past I have ever felt comfortable with where Raiyan is at, I am constantly reminded by these difficult times that we really do have a long way to go with Raiyan. But no matter what, we are determined to get through these difficult times and again, we are always thankful for the fact that Raiyan seems to be coping with everything around him really well.

The stuff that we are working on:

1) Language extension:- the subject matter for this week is “sports” (whereas last week was on nature, which he amazingly got just like that- *snap of a finger*!). Sports isn’t something particularly familiar to him but he still seems interested nevertheless and again, it’s all about familiarizing him with things that other children would probably learn more naturally from TV, like watching tennis, golf, swimming etc. (Note:-I wish the Olympics has reruns!). Right now we are just working on Raiyan naming the various sports and the next step after that would be asking him questions about the sport like “what sport do you play with a racket?”

2) Storytelling:- With the story starter pack, we get picture cards with an animation and a few words describing it and Raiyan is expected to elaborate on the story according to his imagination. This has also been difficult for Raiyan because he always needs something visual for him to describe something or at least a familiar story that he can relate to the cards but since these cards are very new to him he would always just resort to answering “I don’t know” to everything!

3) Emotions: Last week we were working on identifying emotions from somebody’s voice where some of them he got pretty quickly, like happy, excited, angry and tired. The more specific ones like bored, worried, in trouble etc we still have to keep working on. For this week, he is given a set of pictures of people in situations where he has to guess how they are feeling. This is also hard work as Raiyan seems to only remember the basic ones like happy, angry, excited and tired.

4) Homonyms: Raiyan has to learn that a thing can have more than one word for it and a word can also have many meanings (through flashcards). This one he can do quite well and I am also trying to generalize this by introducing more malay words to him at home.

5) “Ask” and “tell” instructions: Raiyan doesn’t really know the difference between asking and telling so this is something we try and generalize at home as much as possible. He’s slowly getting this one but still gets confused at times!

6) Listening: This board game has a cd playing certain sounds in different areas of the house and Raiyan has to match the sound to the picture. Eg. Sound of a hairdryer matching a picture of someone drying her hair or a sound of vegetables being cut being matched to the right picture. This one I was very surprised to find him getting 85% of them right on the first try!

Raiyan has mastered recently (though sometimes still need a little teeny weeny prompting):

1) Syllable drilling: He can tell how many syllables there are in a word
2) Advances pronouns: He knows to appropriately use my, your, his and her
3) Language extension: He knows to label practically anything to do with nature like mountains, lakes, waterfalls and he knows to distinguish between nature and man-made. I swear he was so natural at this that we really think his calling one day is to be a tv host for the discovery channel!
4) Describing topics: He can tell you 5 things about his brother, going on an airplane, a birthday party, hari raya, going to the cinema and his mama!

Raiyan is also coping very well in his classwork according to Jo who shadows him there and he is also by far the best reader as he is now reading level 5M (!!-When the average for the rest of the class is on 3). And because he is so special in his reading skills, he gets special picks for his home reader books (ISB sends a book every single day for the child to read which will then be logged on to a register signed by the person he read the book to) AND he also gets to borrow 2 books from the library instead of just 1! I really hope he can learn a lot of things, especially social situations, from all the stories he reads too.. Anything to half the job for me!

Alhamdulillah for everything! Til next time!