Five Things That Slow a Child Down in the Noorani Qaida

1. The letters were never learnt apart

A child who learnt the alphabet as a song can recite it beautifully and still not know which sound belongs to which shape. Ask them to point at a letter in the middle of a word and say it. If they start the song from the beginning to find it, that is the problem, and it is worth two weeks of going back.

2. Too few lessons, too far apart

The Qaida stage runs on repetition. Two lessons a week with five days between them means the child spends the first part of each lesson recovering what they had. Three or four shorter lessons beat two long ones here, and this is the one stage where that is true.

3. The teacher is doing the reading

Listen to a lesson. If you hear the teacher more than the child, the lesson is a demonstration, not practice. A Qaida lesson should be mostly your child's voice, with short corrections cutting in.

4. Pages turn on the calendar

Some teachers move a page a week because that is what finishes the book in a year. The child arrives at the end of the Qaida on schedule and cannot read the middle of it. There is no deadline on this book. Here the Qaida usually takes four to ten months and some children take longer, and that is a normal range, not a warning.

5. Nothing is revised

• Every lesson should start with the previous page, read again, before anything new.
• Once a month, a page from a month ago. If it has gone, it was never learnt.
• Five minutes at home on most days does more than an hour on Sunday.
• A child who dreads revision is usually a child being tested rather than practised.

What to do this week

Pick one of the five. Sit in on a lesson and listen for who is talking. That single check catches the most common two problems at once, and it costs you half an hour.

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