The skills required to read are decoding, chunking, connecting text, and making inferences. Having these skills developed can help students a lot to learn how to read. There are activities that can help you, as the teacher, in acquiring and developing these skills in your students. Here are some methods to do that:

 

1. Total Physical Response(TPR) – Babies do not learn by memorizing lists. The same holds true for children and adults. Total Physical Response is a method in which learners do tasks in response to the teacher’s commands or learning vocabulary in reading lessons.

For example, the student responds to the teacher’s command of erasing the board. The students learn the meaning of the command by “hearing” and by “direct observation”.  Subsequently, they learn the meaning of the words in the command. As they progress, they are able to comprehend combined commands, like erase the board and dust off the chalk in the eraser.

 

2. Jigsaw – This is a cooperative learning technique in which students are put into small groups. They learn with the use of jigsaw which can be used in lots of ways for many goals. However, the main goal is to obtain and preset new material, review, or informed data. Assign various tasks to each group. For example, one group can be assigned to be the experts in fruits and vegetables, another group is for animals, and another one is for flowers.

As each group progresses with the activity, everyone gets familiar with the photo, the sound of the names seen in the photos, and eventually, in the letters and words.

 

3. Know, Want, Learn(KWL) – is utilized by using a chart or a graphic organizer that can provide a visual of the knowledge the students already have and the questions they have about the subject of the reading. This helps in providing a clear vision of the word(s) being taught in reading.

By: Ma. Janette G. Manlapaz | Special Education Teacher I | Liyang Elementary School | Pilar, Bataan