Ms Deepika Jaimohan of the Resource Department was kind enough to address students of Grade 4 on the topic – ‘comprehending an unknown passage’. She was warmly received by the students.
The essence of the Guest Lecture is as follows – She told the students that reading is an important skill to develop one’s flair for the language. English being the global language one has to be proficient in the language. Daily reading habit would help them achieve this. She insisted students should read for half an hour daily.
The role of punctuation marks in a passage was explained with the metaphor of traffic signal and speed breaker. She said ‘full stop’ is the red signal. If one does not stop then the words will collide and create a chaos. The ‘comma’ is a speed breaker; one has to give a pause to drive through the passage smoothly.
The comprehension passage was distributed. She read once for them and asked the students to read it a minimum of 2 times. She told the students to decipher the meaning of new words taking into consideration the context. Students enjoyed answering the questions based on the passage. The interesting part of the activity was an illustration to express what impacted them from the comprehension passage, which was actually a story.
Students were given cute, bright coloured origami of butterfly struck to colourful straw that could serve as bookmark/decorative piece. The delighted students accepted it with thanks.
The session was a good learning and helped in honing their comprehension skills.