Review the position of A1 in the overall Kumon Japanese
A I is the beginning of the elementary level material. First, let's get an idea of the overall picture by referring to Kumon's progress chart.
In the early childhood materials, the number in front of A became smaller and smaller: "8A→7A→6A". When entering elementary school level materials, the material progresses in the order of "AⅠ→AⅡ→BⅠ→BⅡ. It is as if one letter of the alphabet moves forward one grade level. Therefore, the A I material is the first half of the first grade level material.
At what age are the materials studied?
It is the first half of the first grade level material. If you are just starting Kumon, even a child in grade 2 will probably start around this time. On the other hand, if your child started Kumon at an early stage of preschool, it is around the time when he or she gradually begins to advance to material that is ahead of his or her age. Some children may begin this material at the age of 4 or 5.
What kind of teaching materials are Kumon Japanese A1 and A2?
Let's check the characteristics of each material, AⅠand AⅡ, while referring to the explanations of the Kumon Officials.
First, let's check the explanations of the Kumon formula for AⅠ.
It is important to note that the Kumon Official Explanation for A I includes study items that lean more toward knowledge, such as katakana, kanji, and grammar.
Although Kumon has a strong impression of improving reading comprehension, there is a surprisingly strong tendency to consolidate basic knowledge in the lower grades of Kumon. Even in A1, 70% of the material is devoted to kanji and katakana, and 20% to grammar.
Next, let's check the explanations of the Kumon formulas in A2.
By reading the text, finding the answers, and accurately transcribing them, you will solidify your basic learning attitude. In addition to strengthening the ability to read while always visualizing the contents of the text, students will strengthen the foundation of image-reading by becoming aware of the order of the text contents. 98 kanji characters (mostly from grade 1, some from grade 2) studied in the AⅠ and AⅡ materials will be reviewed in terms of shape and stroke order.
The term "image reading" is used.
In the past, the problems in Kumon's materials could be cleared by understanding a single sentence; in 2A, there were problems of reading a sentence of up to 100 characters, but the nuance of these problems is more like extracting and writing a single sentence from a text, rather than requiring understanding of the flow or entirety of the text. Comprehension was not required that much.
In AII, the sentences are less long than before. Instead, you will have to understand the content, answer the order of the events in the story, and understand who did what in the sentence and extract what they did.
Before going to bed, you must first take a bath. Next, I clean my hair. Q1: What do you do first before you go to bed?
The level of difficulty of the recommended books does not necessarily correspond to the reading comprehension required to solve the problems.
What you need to be aware of with the A materials is the difference in level between the recommended books and the printouts.
Kumon publishes recommended books for grades 5A and up, and from A materials onward, the recommended books are used to cite passages for the questions.
From around 3A, you will start to see sentences of a certain length, and from the A materials, the recommended books are also used in the problem materials, and although they are picture books, you will be reading sentences of a certain difficulty level.
The questions in Kumon's A materials require students to answer the order of the events in the story and who did what. However, this is not all that is required when reading the recommended books for Grade A materials.
Grade A recommended books are clearly of a higher level than the questions in the A materials.
For example, there is "Kon to Aki" (Kon and Aki) in the Grade A Recommended Books. In this story, a child goes to his grandmother's house in the dunes to have his stuffed animal Kon's arm fixed. Aki-chan is saved by Kon on the way, but when she sees Kon's tail getting caught in a door or being taken away by a dog, Aki-chan begins to have a desire to help Kon.
There is also a story about a white rabbit and a black rabbit. The two rabbits are very good friends, but the black rabbit sometimes looks sad. When the White Rabbit asks her what is wrong, she is told that she is making a wish for the two rabbits to stay together forever. The story goes that they then get married.
Both of these stories cannot be explained just by the order of the stories or the who's who part of the story. The main character has a purpose in the story, so it is necessary not only to understand the order, but also to understand that the events are happening in the process of the characters trying to achieve something. Also, the main character has various emotions, such as sadness and determination. Understanding their emotions is also necessary.
In other words, the ability required to read the recommended book itself does not match the difficulty level of the content of the questions.
The discrepancy between the difficulty level of the questions and the difficulty level of the book itself begins to appear in the A materials.
If you do not take countermeasures, the discrepancy will become fatal somewhere after the B materials.
Not only in Kumon, but also in Japanese, only the parts necessary to solve problems are extracted, so up to a certain point, you may be able to solve problems even if you cannot read the book itself. If the difficulty level of the text and your reading comprehension deviate too much, you will find yourself in a situation where you cannot understand the meaning of either the questions or the text at all.
This phenomenon can occur no matter which Kumon materials you are studying, but it is especially likely to occur with Kumon. This is because Kumon offers pre-emptive learning. If the student can solve the problems, the Kumon materials will progress rapidly, and it is quite possible that the student's reading ability has not caught up with the progress of the Kumon materials.
Reading ability makes the difference between this and future progress.
There are several possible countermeasures.
First is prevention. You can ask your Kumon teacher to slow down the progress of your Japanese. In some cases, there are teachers who want to move ahead rapidly in order to achieve a high level of progress. By asking for thorough repetition as a parental request, you can prevent the danger of getting stuck.
If too much progress has already been made, a major step backward can be a powerful countermeasure. Although a loss of motivation is inevitable, you can challenge the material you are currently stuck on after establishing the basics once again.
And the most effective measure of all is reading. You can acquire comprehensive reading comprehension skills by actually reading an entire book that you should be reading at this stage, rather than being satisfied with just being able to solve the problems. If you ask them how they feel about what they have read, you will be able to guess how much they understand the contents of the book. You can reduce the risk of measuring your students' ability only by looking at the difficulty level of the Kumon materials and being disappointed later when you find that they are not as strong as you thought they were.
Kumon Officials also mention that reading is essential for excellent learning results with Kumon.
For more than 60 years, the Kumon Institute of Education has been working to develop children's abilities through individualized and academic instruction, and we have found that all students who have shown excellent learning results in Kumon classes have, without exception, high reading ability. Most of these students are exposed to a wide range of language at an early age through reading picture books to their children, and they have rich communication between parents and children. With this base, they can actively read books on their own and acquire advanced knowledge and a rich sensitivity through self-learning. The ability to read is the foundation of all learning.
In other words, in order to achieve excellent results with the Kumon Method, it is not enough to simply follow Kumon's printouts. In any cram school or exam cram school, there will naturally be differences between students, but in Kumon, the difference is based on reading ability.
This is very useful information if you know it. If you know where the difference arises, it is easy to take countermeasures. If this is a factor that cannot be easily intervened, such as household income or intelligence, but if reading ability is important, and if it is enough to work hard at reading to children, then it is an area that is easy to make an effort.
Conclusion.
With the start of the A materials, the part of learning basic knowledge has increased dramatically. If you study hard, your vocabulary will increase and you will be able to move forward, but on the other hand, it is also true that there is a bottleneck of reading comprehension ahead. While continuing to study the material, let's prepare for the next step by having the students actively read books.