Reading Readiness and Writing Right

The Teacher Foundation organized a one-day workshop ‘Reading Readiness and Writing Right’ in Mysore on Wednesday, January 7th. Gina Menon, Deputy Headteacher of Raynham Primary School, London conducted the workshop. 15 teachers and principals from 7 different schools in Mysore attended this highly enriching workshop. The participating schools were Geetha Shishu Shikshana Sangha , Vijaya Vittala Vidyashala, Rotary Mid town academy, Pragathi Vidya Kendra, The Learning Curve Int. School, Sadvidya Highschool and Ideal Jawa Rotary School. The workshop was for English teachers of primary schools. This workshop was supported by Sir Ratan Tata Trust.

Gina started with an energizer to get the teachers relax. The teachers then made an origami booklet with instructions from Gina. Every activity then onwards unfolded multiple teaching opportunities using local, cheap and easily available material. Audrey of the Learning Curve Int. School says that she can use the ball games in her class wherein crushed newspaper made into a ball using rubber bands is thrown around to get quick answers.

Teachers learnt to play word tennis to practice tenses and adjectives and numerous other things. Gina shared the phonics experiment that she had conducted in her school and shared the sounds of English letters. She talked about teaching capital and fullstop to 1st, 2nd and 3rd standard students.

Teachers created a big visual aid using pictures from old magazines and wrote probes for writing sentences. The teachers discussed that this ‘Big picture with keywords’ activity can be used virtually for any subject.

Gina shared many different activities for punctuations and vocabulary. Teachers liked the 2a activity to make boring sentences interesting using two adjectives. Then there was an adverb activity for frequency adverbs like never, always, regularly, and frequently.

Gina told the story of little red riding hood using paper puppets. Teachers in groups, in turn told the same story using such cool sounds effects that made all the participants laugh out loud.

Gina then shared some strategies for teaching reading comprehension. She emphasized on the importance of questioning and how teachers should start with easy retrieval questions and move on to the harder questions of deduction and inference.

Another secret that Gina shared was the ‘voice level chart’. If used as a whole class exercise it can be effectively used to reduce the voice levels in classrooms while doing the group work. Teachers thought that it was a practical idea and some of them are willing to try it out in their school.

The last activity of Reading Theatre brought out the creative elements in the teachers. They realized how dramatizing a situation helps in comprehension.

Nandini from Sadvidya Highschool noticed, “Learning language was made easy and funny”. Anjana from Geetha Shishu Shikshana Sangha says that she “wants to implement voice level charts, reading theatre and adverb games in her school immediately”. We, at TTF Mysore would love to see these ideas in action in the classrooms

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