Classical for a kid with performance anxiety?

[KC in KS]

That's the best way I can describe it -- DD is very bright, but she HATES being asked to recite back what she's just learned. Notebook pages? "I don't know what to write! I can't draw that!" Oral review? She hides her face and won't speak.

 

She's in K/1st - we're doing SOTW I very slowly. I know she grasps the material, but she can't stand being asked to demonstrate it.

 

Whatever shall I do with her?

[LidiyaDawn]

 

Whatever shall I do with her?

 

Stop bugging her about it. :p

 

Seriously though - just let her be. She's only six years old - and you said yourself that you know she's understanding.

 

If you really want to have extras - do you have the activity guide? Maybe she'd have some fun with some of the projects if she's an artsy hands-on type... you'd be able to tell a lot about her understanding from doing the project/playing the game/etc with her...but keep it lighthearted - don't set it up so she feels like you've put her on the stage to 'show me what you know'.

[Harriet Vane]

Perhaps you can use some fill-in-the-blank as a training tool. Write up a really simple worksheet for the reading selection with sentence openers for her to finish. I'll use Little Red Riding Hood as an example:

 

Little Red Riding Hood was going _______________________ .

 

She met a ______________________ along the way.

 

The wolf pretended ___________________________________.

 

The woodsman ____________________________.

 

You could even start a drawing for her and give specific instructions for how to finish it. For example, you could put a basic line drawing of a house above the fill-in-the-blank sentences and tell her to put in the wolf, grandmother, and Little Red Riding Hood.

 

My own ds did not like narrations at all. Everything changed, however, when I started giving him homemade worksheets to fill out. The key in my ds' case, however, was to make him think that these were Really Official Worksheets, not something Mom made at home. I typed them on the computer secretly. ;) In our case, the worksheets were far less specific than what I suggest above. On ds' worksheets, I simply typed a narration prompt, like, "Tell what happened to Little Red Riding Hood." Then below I typed a drawing prompts, like, "Draw what happened in grandmother's house." There was a line for ds' name at the top--he LOVED that--and I put a border on the paper to make it really official-looking. It took me all of a minute to make a worksheet page like this, and got ds over the hump.

 

Over time you can stop with the worksheets and helps. Perhaps in September you can say something like, "Now that you're older you are smart enough to do a different kind of narration." Once she has a specific idea of what is expected and sees that more independence in the area is a new privilege for someone who is older and wiser, she should be able to grow into less help.

Edited January 15, 2011 by strider