Content Page

What are Learning Skills?------------------------------------------------------------------

Introduction to SOI-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Parents’ Role----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dos and Don’ts-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Understanding the Skill: Visual Closure--------------------------------------------------

Activity 1: Peephole Pictures---------------------------------------------------------------

Activity 2: Guess What?---------------------------------------------------------------------

Activity 3: Word Shape----------------------------------------------------------------------

More About Visual Closure-----------------------------------------------------------------

Contact Us-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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What are Learning Skills?

���Learning skills also referred to as Cognitive Skills are foundational skills needed in areas such as comprehension, memory, evaluation, processing, logic and reasoning, etc.

Using sports as an analogy: In order to play soccer well, the player must first be equipped with the basic skills of dribbling, passing, control and tackling, etc.

In the same way, we need to first equip our children with the basic skills of learning such as paying attention, reading words effectively, being careful with their work, retain their learning well, etc so that we can ensure a motivated, engaged and successful learner.

At ThinkersBox, we hope to help children to ‘Learn to Think and Think to Learn’ by improving and strengthening their underlying learning skills. ���

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The Structure of Intellect (SOI)

The Structure of Intellect (SI) Model was established by Professor J. P. Guilford, a well-known psychologist in the 1950s, as a way to measure intelligence. The model was further developed into the SOI by Dr. Mary Meeker, Guilford’s student and a school psychologist, in the early 1960s. The SOI profiles was used to provide classroom teachers with information on how they can plan classroom materials that could meet the different needs of their students.

The most important contribution however, was Dr. Mary Meeker’s realization that intelligence can be taught, trained and improved.

At ThinkersBox, we work closely with SOI Systems to assess, train and improve the learning of children and help them become successful learners.

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The Parents’ Role

In response to parents’ need for resources and ideas to help their child learn better, we have developed this series of guidebooks with simple, easy to implement home-based activities for parents to do with their child.

These activities are meant to be fun, engaging and promotes parent-child bonding.

As you work with your child, you would begin to realise their potential and the true meaning of educating our children (beyond school textbooks and subjects)

**Instructions for the activities are suggested as a rough guideline. Feel free to change it to suit the age and learning of your child.

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Dos and Don’ts

✓  Do the activities with your child

✓  Encourage him/her to do better

✓  Encourage your child to be creative when doing the activities!

✓  Have fun carrying out the activities!

X Scold the child if he does ��� the activities wrongly, ��� instead, explain to him the ��� objective and tell him the ��� instructions explicitly

X Carry out the activity for ��� too long (once the child ��� gets bored or tired of doing ��� the same activity, stop for ��� the day)

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Understanding the skill: Visual Closure

"   Visual Closure is the ability to understand and recognize pictorial information as a unit on its own

"   This skill is related to tasks involving figural comprehension such as reading tables, charts, graphs, letters, symbols and word recognition

"   Improving this skill would reduce incidents of stumbling, tripping, over-reaching or knocking over things and would enable the child to see complete words when reading

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Activity 1: Peephole Pictures

"   Tear a page of pictures (could be from a magazine or newspapers) ���

"   Find a plain page of paper of the same size and cover the page with pictures���

"   Cut a small hole on the top piece of paper, revealing only a portion of the whole picture ���

"   Have the child guess the picture

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Activity 2: Guess What?

"   Write a few partial numbers or letters on a piece of paper and have the child guess what each number or letter is���

"   Increase the difficulty by writing partial words ���

"   For children who are more advanced, choose a short story and have the child copy the story (using a pencil) on a piece of paper���

"   Have the child read the story once���

"   Erase the top half part of each sentence���

"   Have the child read the story again

(Partial letter)

(Partial Story)

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Activity 3: Word Shape

"   On a piece of paper, write down items that can be found in the house or from a vocabulary list suitable for the child’s level (use markers and write the words big enough) ���

"   Have the child use a different coloured pen or marker to outline the shape of the words���

List of possible words: table, chair, television, shoes, refrigerator,

oven, mirror, cupboard, stools etc. Shape

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More About Visual Closure

•  Visual closure is the ability to recognize pictorial information as a unit on its own. Children with poor visual closure skill would tend to skip words when reading

•  This would result in information being misread or misunderstood

•  In the case of answering comprehension questions, misreading the text might cause inaccuracy in answers which ultimately leads to marks being deducted

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On an ending note... We  hope   that   you  would   .ind   these  activities   as   fun  and  effective  as  we  meant  for  it  to  be.    

Let  us  know  if  you’ve  enjoyed  using  these  e-­‐Books    @  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WS8Q9CR  

For   f eedback   and   sugges t ions ,   emai l   us   @  enquiries@thinkersbox.com  

For  more  information,  visit  us  @  www.thinkersbox.com  

For   more   interesting   reads,   follow   our   blog   @  www.kidslearntothink.com  

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The End! Does your child take a long time to digestwhat

was read? Or that he/she is constantly re-reading the text in a comprehension passage?

Find out how you can improve your child’s Visual

Memory skills in the next intallment to be published in August!