Yesterday Kwamai and I did a few fun things. For one, we read through a science book on light and colors. It was written with a little information, then questions to elicit from the reader what s/he already knew about the subject at hand, and experiments to find out more.
Here are some of Kwamai's comments.
Q: What are things that give off light?
A: The sun, the full moon, lots of little stars all bunched together, planet blobs in the sky.
Q: How can you see at night?
A: You can use your whiskers to feel where you are.
Q: How can you make a shadow get bigger?
A: Hold someone's hand.
We tried our first full-fledged science experiment, which was supposed to show that if you twirl a multi-colored ring around you will see white, due to colors blending into white light. It didn't work, but Kwamai thought it was great fun anyway.
Then I tried a little idea to expand Kwamai's sight vocabulary and ability to spell beyond toilet content words. I gave him a magazine, asked him to pick out pictures and tell me what word he associated with it. He picked Elmo, football (as in the sport, not the object), drums, funny face and colors. I pasted the pictures onto cardboard, and put the written words on the back. He looked them over a few times, and was able to tell me by looking at the word what it said very quickly. He did have to concentrate a bit a couple of times which tells me he truly was reading it. The funny thing was, when he tried to verbally spell "drums", he started out "p...". From reading the book Upsidedown Brilliance, I knew that if I told him that b, d, p, and q were all the same letter just turned a different way, that that would make sense (and was "ok" and wouldn't scar him educationally for life!!)
The cool thing to see was how his confidence soared after mastering these few words. It was like he knew he could do something he really wanted to do.
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