25 Ways To Ask Your Kids “So How Was School Today?”

In my work as a member of the program development team with Scouts Canada we’ve reached a point where we’re now rolling out the new program — The Canadian Path — and one of the 4 elements is a component of Plan-Do-Review. We know Scouters are likely to say, “we do review” but we know that isn’t the case. Review is more than just asking “How did you like what we did?” “Did it go OK?” 

We’re been developing lists of age appropriate questions to help the adults engage the youth in real discussion about the activities they undertake to help them realize what they’ve learned and as a launch pad for planning new experiences. It’s complicated.

Recently one of the program development team shared with us a news article that applies directly to what we’re trying to have happen in Scouting: 25 Ways To Ask Your Kids “So How Was School Today?” The point isn’t to ask “How was school today?” but to ask reflective questions that allows  a child to think about the day from a different perspective. We’ll probably share the article with Scouters because it will help broaden their repertoire of review questions and turn Review into a learning activity for both adults and kids.

Update on Calvin

I met with Calvin and Leanne last week – our second visit. I was curious to see what had happened with his reading over the summer so I offered him a book he hadn’t seen (The Little Fish That Got Away by Bernadine Cook and Crockett Johnson). It’s a predictable book and I wanted to see how Calvin did with it. We started with a shared reading, but I quickly dropped out letting Calvin read on his own. He used the pictures to help himself predict words he didn’t recognize, he used his general knowledge to help him fill in text where he wasn’t sure what particular words were — all of his predictions were semantically appropriate (bucket instead of basket, for example). 

Half way through the book Calvin started to tire — the book was a bit longer than he was used to but with some encouragement he finished the story – predicting the ending before we got to it!

I sent the book home with him to read again if he wanted to. I was thinking he probably wouldn’t actually pick it up, but I was wrong. Leanne wrote me later that day: “Calvin came home and read the book for his father and sister.” He doesn’t need to read it again – he may, but he’s got from that book what I was hoping he would — a strengthening of his sense of being an independent reader.

What I want to work on during the fall is spelling — to help him sort out the correspondences between sounds (how they feel in his mouth/articulation) and the graphemes that represent them. I’ve started him on consonant clusters in simple 4-5 letter words focusing on lax (short) vowels; I’m seeing him again in a month — it’ll be interesting to see whether Leanne has been successful in helping him consolidate that information.