"Ignoramus967" wrote in message
...
My 9 year old got his report card scores today. His percentile rank is
at 99% in math, but only 92% in English.

I think that he can do better than than on English. I got 90% on GMAT
verbal part, after just one year of living here, and he's lived in the
US for 9 years, out of which he spoke English for 6 years.

My question is how do we improve his English, given his age of 9. My
first thought is that he needs to just find something that he likes to
read about and read a lot more. I think that simply reading good books
(good as in, giving some examples of good use of the language) is
already a big help.

My second thought is maybe he just needs to find some fun club, group,
discussion forum, theater, tutor or something like that that would
somehow make him more interested in learning English. He has a math
tutor who tries to keep him interested in math, maybe we can find some
equivalent of that for English.

I never studied English formally, so I am not very experienced in such
matters.

i

First off I would not worry too much about the current verbal scores, the
top 8% is pretty good.

But with a 10 year old that just finished the 4th grade with an award for
reading skills what we did was to foster their love of reading from a very
young age. As an example every night we would read them (He has a twin
sister.)two books allowing them to choose the titles. After I got tired of
the same books over and over I would look to diversify things a bit. I
started with the atlas of the United States and allowed them to each pick a
state. I would then in my own corny accent read them each states
description, famous people and all of the other information. I would pay
special attention to any question they would ask and parlay that into other
bedtime reading. As an example my daughter once asked why was Jack London
famous? that started stories by Jack London.

When my kids entered kindergarten, the exit standards were that they would
know their shapes and colors, count to 30 etc. My kids not only knew that,
but also could tell you each of the state capitols and could count to 100 by
ones, twos fives and tens.

We would also go out for some ice cream and I would work on math with them
by explaining that if they understood addition then they already understood
multiplication showing them how they could figure out any multiplication
problem just by understanding that the problem was just a step up from the
addition.

While I succeeded in allowing my son to have a really good accuracy in
solving his math problems at school, he has refused to memorize his
multiplication tables so his computation speed is not where it should be.

I suspect that each person has some slightly different way of thinking about
concepts. If your son does well in math, then he will do well in language
as math is a language.

The library is a great thing to get the kid to learn to love. Once they get
their nose into books they never stop.

--
Roger Shoaf
If you are not part of the solution, you are not dissolved in the solvent.