Our teaching and learning strategies
The programme employs the use of Jolly phonics method of teaching English language, Raz-plus literacy program, Susan Jones teaching and other teaching resources from teachers pay teachers.
Learning the alphabet:
The pupils are taught to recognise, pronounce and write the 26 alphabets in English language, various strategies and materials are used.
Phonics: Once the pupils can recognise, pronounce and write the English alphabets, the next unit is to teach them phonic sounds and the corresponding graphemes. We adopt the jolly phonic letter sound sequence in teaching the individual sounds of each letter.
- s a t i p n
- Ck e h r m d
- g o u l f b
- ai j oa ie ee or
- z w ng v oo oo
- y x ch sh th th
- qu ou oi ue er ar
From the above arrangement, the sounds consisting of single consonant and vowel sounds, digraphs and vowel teams are grouped into seven different categories. In teaching these letter sounds, the pupils are engaged in phonological and phonemic skills:
- Syllables
- Onset rime
- Beginning sound
- Middle sound
- Ending sound
- Blending
- Segmenting phonemes
Adding phonemes
Deleting phonemes
Substituting phonemes
By the end of teaching this unit, majority of the pupils would have been able to read and write consonant vowel consonant words (CVC) and consonant vowel consonant vowel words (CVCe) such as sat, pat, fat, bag, sit, cot, tap, man, run, leg, feet, hit, set, ten nest e.t.c
The next learning step is the consonant blends, this is when two or three consonants are together before or after a vowel in a word. It can be at the beginning or end of a word. For example the word great has the consonant blend gr at the beginning. In consonant blend, both sound can be heard. The literacy intervention makes use of teaching resources and strategies from Raz plus and Susan jones teaching in handling consonant blends. The beginning consonant blends are – S blends (Sk, Sl, Sn, Sp, St, Sw), L blends (Bl, Fl, Pl, Cl, Gl, Sl) and R blends (Br, Cr, Dr, Fr, Pr, Tr) are taught, followed by three consonants s blends (scr, spr,squ,str) then the final consonant blends are introduce to the pupils (ft, ld, lp ,it, mp, nch, tch).
The next step the pupils would be engaged is how to read and write high frequency words such as the, a, on, this, is, in, was, e.t.c. According to research ‘only thirteen different words make up 25 percent of the words we read and write.’ There are 100 words that make up 50 percent of the words we read. These words are called high frequency words. The intervention uses teaching materials and strategies from Raz plus to teach high frequency words. At the end of this units, majority of the pupils would have been able to read decodable books through constant practice.
The pupils are introduced to Alternatives after they have been taught high frequency words. This unit teaches the pupils that each long vowel can be written in different ways but the sound does not change.
- Long a vowel teams (ay, ai)
- Long e vowel teams (ee, ea, ey)
- Long i vowel teams (ie, igh)
- Long o vowel teams (oe, oa, ow)
- Long u vowel teams (ew, ue, ui)
- In addition to this, the below reading skills are taught after the long u vowel teams.
- R-controlled vowels (er, ir, ur)
- R-controlled vowel (ar)
- R-controlled vowel (or)
- Diphthongs (oi/oy)
- Diphthong (ou, ow)
- Diphthongs (au/aw)
- Long and short oo
- Y as a vowel
The literacy intervention engage the pupils with various strategic to improve their fluency in reading, but we ensure the pupils choose the right books for their level. We encourage the pupils to read more nonfiction books.