 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
How to help with...research skillsYour child has an endless thirst for new information and learning. By showing her how to do her own research you will be helping her with an invaluable life skill. In this instalment of Spark Island's 'How to...' guides, primary school teacher Sean Callery offers some useful advice on how to hunt down facts and figures. In a nutshell Check out these tips on how you can boost your child's research skills
Start early on when your child is learning to read, or just enjoying picture books. Ask her to find a page where a key part of the story happens, such as where a character first appears, and ask her how old that character is. She'll need good short-term memory skills to find it quickly. There are thousands of great information books about: find ones that match her interests. Show her how the contents page tells her where general topics are, while the index at the back shows where specific information is. She could create her own glossary of key words about her hobby. Indexes are alphabetical, so teach her the alphabet. When she knows it, ask her which letters are about half way through, or near the beginning or the end - it's surprising how some children always have to start at 'a' to find a letter! Skimming and scanning These are valuable reading skills. Skimming is where you pick up a general idea of what a piece of writing is about without reading every word. Start just by looking at headings and sub-headings. Read a page of any book (story or information) and agree on a sentence that says what it is about. Scanning is where you find particular information, like dates or names. This can be fun to practise together as you can challenge each other to find certain words. What do I know already? If she has, say, a holiday project to research, ask her to note down: 'What I know already', then 'What I want to know', and finally 'Where am I going to find out?'. This will help her identify what she needs to do next. When she has finished, she will be able to answer the question 'What have I learned?' Where to look Good researchers know where to look. Show her how libraries often mark shelves to indicate what subjects the books are about. Help her to find the 'Dewey' number for the types of books she likes. Let her explore the different kinds of encyclopaedia, from illustrated children's ones to multi-volume tomes. If she is going to research using electronic media, make sure it uses words and language she can read and understand. A child who goes into school with a 'project' printed straight from a CD ROM has learned nothing. Show her how to highlight the important bits to print - and then to put into her own words. Check the computer she is using will screen out inappropriate material. What I found out Your child needs to learn how to present information well. Children tend to simply copy whole sentences at first. Use skimming and scanning, as above, to identify general ideas and key facts. Give her a photocopy of a page and use colouring pencils or highlighter pens to mark the important bits. This is the start of good note-taking. Write down these key parts of the text - not whole sentences. Ask her to talk to you about the topic just from her notes. You can build on this by playing a game where you have to talk about a topic for one minute only, including all the key information. One way of practising this is to watch commercial television and ask her to tell you the key points from the programme during the ad breaks. To recap, you can help your child improve her research skills by:
Check out our Activity and resource finder where you'll find tailored learning activities to develop your child's skills in English, maths and science. |
