What grade level is Kumon Japanese D for?
Kumon D materials are equivalent to 4th grade elementary school.
If you started Kumon in grade 2 or 3, it is standard to finish the D materials in grade 4. If a family is putting a lot of effort into Kumon, they may reach this point in grade 1. If they have reached this point in their senior year, it would be outstanding both in terms of the family's commitment and the child's ability.
What kind of materials is Kumon Japanese D I?
Kumon gives examples of its teaching materials on its official website. First, let's check the description of the D I teaching materials.
The Kumon Japanese D I course is designed to develop the ability to quickly understand the topic and narrative parts of a compound sentence, as well as to accurately read the various information contained in the sentence. Students will learn to organize the contents of sentences according to the topic, and will be introduced to the reading attitude of "grasping in a coherent manner," which is the main learning task of DII. Of the 200 Kanji characters in the 4th grade, 104 new Kanji characters will be studied to expand vocabulary. In addition, students will review the Kanji learned in DⅠ using radicals as a starting point.
In the C material, students will be asked to extract important information from a single sentence in the form of "5W1H" or "Question and Answer"; in the DII material, the number of such clusters will increase from one to several, and DⅠ will be a preparation for this. Also, the number of Kanji characters covered in the materials has increased.
What kind of Kumon Japanese DII materials are they?
Let's continue with the explanation of the DII teaching materials.
Kumon Japanese DⅡ is designed to cultivate the ability to grasp the content of sentences in units of "clusters" for each topic, and to develop the ability to read sentences in units of clusters while being aware of the topic. Of the 200 Kanji characters in the 4th grade, 96 new Kanji characters will be studied to expand vocabulary. In addition, students will review all the kanji learned in DII using the radicals as a starting point.
Students will continuously be asked questions to grasp sentences in "coherent" form.
Kumon Japanese D requires the improvement of reading comprehension itself.
The ability to grasp sentences in a coherent manner is, when you get right down to it, an improvement in reading comprehension itself.
For example, you can answer basic questions in Japanese for the exam if you can grasp the gist of the passage before and after the question. If the question is more difficult, you will need to grasp the gist of the entire sentence to answer it. If you are a well-read person, you can look at the table of contents to get the gist of the book as a whole, and then read the necessary sections carefully. If you are an expert in a certain field, you can read not only a book or an article by itself, but also understand the position of the article in various studies related to the field.
Increasing coherence will lead to improvement of reading comprehension itself. Therefore, it can be said that the "ability to read a text in chunks," which is the first step in improving reading comprehension, is the very first step in improving reading comprehension.
In Kumon Japanese D, it is easy to feel "I don't understand the problem? It is easy to feel "I don't understand the problem?
One of the most common problems we often hear with the D materials is that children "just copy down the problem sentences without understanding the content.
From an adult's point of view, it may be a matter of course to understand the content of a sentence by grasping it as a coherent whole. Therefore, when we see a child working on D materials that require comprehension of the content, we are shocked to realize for the first time that the child does not understand the text as well as we expect. In addition, Kumon materials are designed to repeat the basics. When they begin to be tested on their ability to comprehend content, which is not knowledge, there will be many doubts about whether Kumon's existing methods will be effective.
However, understanding the content is not a skill that is acquired at the beginning of the D-learning materials, it is a skill that is acquired in the D-learning materials.
Many children may be confused because they are required to use their minds in a qualitatively different way than before. However, Kumon believes that not only memorizing knowledge, but also using the mind to understand the content can be acquired through a step-by-step approach and repetition. Rather than being shocked that they did not understand the content, it is desirable to think that they will be able to understand the content through this material.
Experience in handling a large amount of information will lead to a successful attack on Kumon Japanese D
In order to acquire the ability to grasp sentences as a coherent whole, it is effective to give students the opportunity to process a large amount of information.
If you are not under any pressure, you will not feel the need to process sentences as a coherent whole. If you read each sentence from the beginning, you will at least understand what is written in that one sentence. Those who can read coherently may think that this reading method takes too much time and does not allow them to correctly understand the meaning of the sentence. But for someone who doesn't know how to read coherently, what's wrong with being able to understand the sentence?
The only way to get out of this mindset is to feel the need to process information quickly and accurately.
For example, if you like books, you will find many books to read. But if you can't capture the content in a coherent way, it will take you a long time to read the book, and you will lose track of what it says in the middle of the reading. If you are still curious about the contents of a book, you will read the book again and again and try to read it all the way through. In the process of doing so, they will realize that they need a different way of reading.
Daily communication is also useful in terms of information processing. Conversations among friends are important, but what is useful here is more one-way communication. If you have a classmate who is a mentor or a geek in some field, you may have the opportunity to learn information that you do not know. The person in a teaching position is likely to share a lot of details that are unnecessary because he or she knows so much. If your child can find a way to communicate with such people, he or she will be better able to choose and discard information.
In the C material, I mentioned before, children will learn to understand which information is important through familiarity with stories, and in the D material, it will be important for them to have opportunities to read books like illustrated books that tell them more and more about unknown and miscellaneous knowledge, rather than stories that naturally attract their interest. As a parent, I think an effective approach would be to help your child find and develop some area of intellectual curiosity.