Teaching Methods
READING TECHNIQUES AND ACTIVITIES
USED IN OUR SCHOOL
When we came back from Istanbul in November, the staff was told about all the information exchange in the meetings.
Teachers had a look to all the different reading techniques and we all agree with the idea: each one would apply those preferred.
So here you have some evaluation about those techniques:
Jacinta (class teacher in group 4 B, 8 and 9 years) says that “because they are new and adaptable, I have chosen the following activities”:
§ A Polish one: “the sliding method”, with which the teacher shows the pupils how they have to lengthen the pronunciation of vowels and some consonants. Children slide from sound to sound very slowly as they read, and so they have more time to recognise the following sound. Jacinta says “it results very positive, specially for one child whose first language is French, and had to learn Spanish at the age of 6. Recognising each word took him a lot of time, and so lengthening the sounds does not interrupt the reading and can offer the child more fluency”.
§ Another Polish activity: showing the children some syllables:
RO FA ME SI CE
FE ZO LA GO SU
HA DE FI ÑA DO
JA VI SO TA LI
They must: 1) read the syllables from up to down; 2) read the syllables across; 3) read those which include the A; 4) read those which include the O; 5) read the one which is over FI; etc…
Jacinta says that “it is very funny. Children do it as a game. I encourage them to do it at home, increasing the speed”.
§ From Wales, Jacinta has chosen “Recording the reading at home”. It consists of recording the children as they are reading. “I have not included in class yet, but in the next meeting with parents I will suggest it, also to involve the parents more”.
§ And also from Wales, Jacinta thinks that “inventing titles with one letter is very funny for them, and for me it is very useful, as it encourages them to think, to invent, to be creative and to read”.
On the other hand, Mari Luz is the teacher in charge of helping children with learning difficulties. She supports other teachers, solving those problems. Mari Luz usually brings them out to her class individually or in small groups (two or three children) and develops several activities in order to solve those reading difficulties.
She has applied three Polish methods: the “Synthetic-analytic” one, the “Sliding” one and the “Global” one as well.
In general, she thinks that “the results of the three methods have been very beneficial, children have felt quite motivated and involved, and also interested while carrying out the different activities”.
Mari Luz says also that “once that the phoneme has been introduced ( /l/, /m/, /p/ …), writing has been also worked on, proposing them appropriated and in agreement with the phonemes introduced”.
For her, “it has been a very gratifying work, not only for pupils, but also for me, who have been the mean of the execution”.
Another teacher, Pilar (class teacher, 3.A., 7 and 8 years old) says that “we encourage children, as the English school does, to read some books per year. Together with the reading of each book, they complete a brief worksheet (see the document attached), which will become more and more difficult as terms go by”.
Every 15 days they are free to choose a book from the school library. When the finish that book, they work on the worksheet and keep them in a card index: a shoe box.
Twice a month, Pilar evaluates, as Turkish teachers do, the pupils’ reading ability, taking into account some items like: average, good, very good and excellent. A reading comprehension worksheet and a summary is also carried out.
“Children are always encouraged to read books, giving them enough arguments to practise more and more”.
During the first term, we tried to develop the Welch idea of reading for 10 or 15 minutes after the break, “and it’s true! It seemed as they were calmed down, they went out to a silent atmosphere, after coming from a game and shouting time”.
Another class teacher, Manoli ( class 1.B., children aged 5 and 6), has applied a Polish activity, but with some changes.
“We did the exercise reading syllables across and down, those with O, those which are on FI, on the right, on the left… In this moment, they found the activity quite more difficult; we have also included some variations: look for sense words, joining the syllables; build up a sentence with each word discovered; read all these syllables across and down, forming no sense words; think about the meaning of those no sense words (a bird, a lake, a fast train…)”.
According to Manoli, “the experience has been very satisfactory, and children have been very participating”.
Later on, three of us went to Hungary, to participate in the second meeting of the course year. There we also showed our activities, quite similar to the ones we had been developing until then since we went to Turkey: methods and activities introduced by other countries.
But afterwards, teachers wanted to change activities, so they started to develop some other interesting reading works: poetry, reading at home, reading in pairs, focus work in a text from all the subjects, etc… This kind of activities have been more and more motivating for both children and teacher than the others we developed at the beginning of the year.
In fact, they will be developed further more next course year.
