4rd WEEK

 

Today is the 23th of November, the coldest day of this course, at least, that seems to me. To accompany this cold day, there is not better topic that fits more with this weather… Today we are going to focus on reading skills and strategies.

First of all, we have to share our personal experiences from when we began reading in English. I can not remember how I started reading in my foreign language. I think it was something implicit during the progress of the lessons. Once we started reading in our mother tongue, I suppose, English teachers began given us reading activities in class to read ou loud and practise, but I can not remember reading an English book until the very last ending of high school, and it was The Catcher in the Rye.

Reading involves cultural context. The reader will decode the information and would interpretate it by his/her point of view, the social background she/he has, previous experiences and their personality.

APPROACHES TO READING

1.       Part-centered approach: It is related with Bottom up in listening skills. It involves phonics and sight words. From learning the parts of the text to isolated words or concepts.

Whole Language approach: It is related with Top-down in listening skills. From understanding a part to the whole text. 

As a teacher, we have to have a bank of resources to adapt to every situation. Every situation is different. Also, adding writing tasks emphasizes better the understanding of reading.

Reading needs to involve real purpose to promote it.

Effective readers use strategies to understand what they read before, during and after reding. Students can be taught to be strategic and effective readers. These strategies are not available to be applicable in all cases. We need to use it progressively and depending the level.

Today is the 24^th of November and it is a really cold day to be fair. Today we begin the lesson by listening to a video explanation of phonics called Jolly Phonics songs in correct order! Letters and sounds ((242) Jolly Phonics Songs in correct order! Letters and Sounds - YouTube). It was quite cute as well as useful. It makes me wonder if I could use it at my private lessons, even though my student is 8 years old, because it is a funny and engaging way to practise sounds that he does not acquired yet. This video includes actions too that are integrated in the sounds, words, etc, it is TPR.

Music is a perfect way to start a class. We can also make it a routine in our daily lesson process.

Later on we get into the topic of phonics and word families. It is important, as lesson management, to see first vowel and consonant sounds and then we connect it to phrases and sentences to integrate them into a context. Some tools we can use to make this are:

·       Shound chart: connect a concept with the sound. This is a powerful tool to help students to learn to read.

·       Games: These ones can be played in small groups to promote cooperative learning. Some examples are: In-a-Row game or the bingo. We can fin ideas like these ones in StarFall (Learn to Read with Phonics | Starfall Education). It is important to combine online resources with common and traditional ones like books. You can buy or create them, maybe with Arts&Crafts teacher to promote teamwork between teachers too.

We keep on the lesson by overviewing some books suggestions from Dolores’ library to have an example of all the materials we can have at hand to practise reading. As a teacher, we have to provide as many opportunities to practise and fail as we can, students need that space of try and fail with comfort.

Unless we try these tools, we won’t know if they are useful to us.

To the question that appeared in class of what should we do if our students make phonics mistakes we came into an agreement on instead of being always correcting our students’ speeches we could do remedial activities to solve the different problems that show up in class before it becomes a language disaster. Maybe we can begin with group activities and if we detect a specific problem with a determinate phonic for example or with a individual student, we give them a specific activity.

Another strategy could be Cecilia’s proposal of “Oh, you meant…” to expose the correct phonic without a high level of affective filter. By Dolores point of view immediate correction does not always work, we need to work it afterwards but not in the immediate time. While talking they are not listening to you, they are only hearing. It is a progressive long term, so we need to focus our attention is giving them the information during the process. If we not correct errors, they will fossilized into mistakes.

To finish todays lesson, we have seen another topic related with the previous one: Writing skills. In essence, we need to connect writing and reading activities to improve both skills. While writing students show their personalities and it is an engaging way to motivate them too. Also, we can not ask them to write just out of the blue without any previous preparation. It is something we need to work on progressively.

 

Today is the 25^th of November, and for this class we will be working alone. My classmate and I decided to planned what each of us has to prepare for the project (divided the project in different tasks and each of us do some of them). At the end of the supposed class, more less at 10 a.m. we decided to connect on Teams to share what we have done, fix some problems on the planning and set the final tasks that are needed to be done so we can finish the project.