"What did you do in school today?" The Tip of an Iceberg
If you're like most parents, "What did you do in school today?" is probably the first question you put to your child at the end of the day. And if your experience is like that of other families, it's likely that the query serves mainly as a conversation-stopper.
Most parents cannot understand why. The question, asked with the best of intentions, seems so simple! Are the children just being ornery? Did they do something awful in school that they do not want to talk about? Are they so tuned out that they don't know what happened?
Occasionally, those conjectures are relevant. Usually they're not. The question is far more complex than appears on the surface and it truly stymies many children. It only seems simple because you already have the skills to come up with an appropriate answer. And as with any skill that's been conquered, there is amnesia for the process that got you there. For example, do you remember how you learned to talk, or how you learned to read, or how you learned to play a sport? With rare exceptions, this type of knowledge is irretrievable.
Still you might be wondering, "Where is the complexity in the question?" The answer is "all over the place."
For a start, to be answered effectively, the question requires the child to take numerous events distributed over hours of time, and then organize the myriad of details in a fashion where those that are insignificant can be deleted (e.g., getting on the bus, going to lunch) while those that are significant (e.g., doing an art project, learning a new type of math problem) can be selected. Then he or she has to find the single preeminent event that captures the day and put it into one or more sentences that the listener can comprehend. Further, this is taking place in conversation where there are built-in time constraints. If the interchange is not to break down, the child has to do all this in three to five seconds.
So the question is far from simple. That's why it's appropriate to view it as "the tip of an iceberg"--a marker for something much larger and potentially destructive. Basically, the processes that the question calls upon are the same as the processes required day-in and day-out throughout a child's life. When? In dealing with reading comprehension. If a child is unable to master these demands, reading success is doomed.
The connection, though, is rarely realized. The question "what did you do in school today?" starts getting asked when the child is only a preschooler. Reading comprehension, on the other hand, is generally on the back burner until a child reaches third to fourth grade. The gap of several years makes it seem as if these are totally unrelated skills.
The connection is also hidden by the focus on decoding that dominates early reading; that is, recognizing letters and being able to look at clusters of letters and come up with the words they represent (c-a-t is cat). As in the famous title, The Cat in the Hat, the words are simple and comprehension does not seem to be an issue. It is only when the message gets much more complex--and that occurs around fourth grade, that comprehension issues become obvious and the focus finally shifts to this important arena. However, if little has been done prior to fourth grade, children can face disaster. The new demands plunge them into a morass of complexity for which they are unprepared.
Ideally, the basis for effective reading comprehension should be established early--well before the child has to read complex material. That is why Phonics Plus Five has been designed to offer unique well-designed comprehension activities that start once the child is past the earliest levels of reading. The activities titled Gleaning Meaning teach children how to extract and present the main idea--the lynchpin of effective reading comprehension. This is one more activity that enables Phonics Plus Five to provide the comprehensive system that from the get-go teaches the full range of reading, writing, and comprehension skills a child needs for academic success.
