Very Creative

Seeing this made my day!

Do you know what school this is?

Teachers Rising to the Paper Plate Challenge

 ... at SK Pulau Mansok

The Year 1 teacher used the paper plate challenge to give her pupils the opportunity to develop an understanding of the relationship between the sounds of the segmented phonemes and the way they blend into a word; she also presented the meaning of the word through pictures. Teacher Maheran divided the plates into sets of three: 1. segmented sounds, 2. whole words, 3. illustrated meanings. The children had already been introduced to the phonics and the vocabulary from Units 1 through to 7. The pupils were unaware of the pedagogy, of course. The class was engaged in a variety of games to reinforce the sounds of the each words, the words themselves, and the meanings from running into sound-word-meaning groups to guessing / memorising the positions of upturned plated to make sets for their teams. After the games were played, Teacher Maheran gave the children worksheets she had made to accompany the language practised during the games and to practise their writing skills. It was a very successful lesson that touched on a wide variety of skills for a specific topic.
Stephen-Peter Jinks (ELC Jerantut)

The plates are divided into sets 

The students get into groups of friends.

Memory game.

Modeling how to find your group of friends.

Enjoying the writing section of the task.

Part of the worksheet.

Teachers Rising to the Paper Plate Challenge

... at SJK(C) Sungai Jan
Year 2 teachers face an enormous challenge teaching the language and concepts of 'directions'(Unit 3). Teacher Nuurul used the paper plate challenge to create a series of games to familiarise the children with the words and symbols we use for giving and receiving directions. Familiarity with these terms is the first step toward a real understanding of the language of directions. Other teachers at SJK(C) Sungai Jan will follow up with a computer-based activity that gives the pupils the opportunity to test their understanding of the signs and sounds of directions.
Stephen-Peter Jinks (ELC Jerantut)

Everyone was given a plate with a direction from Unit 3 expressed either in words or symbols. When the teacher said 'go' everyone ran to find their partner. 

The partners

The plates

Playing a memory matching game to solidify the relationship between the word and the symbol

Making Classroom Resources ...

... and then, making the resource do all the work!

At a recent series of school-based workshops, teachers discussed the cost / benefit ratio for teacher-made resources. During our discussion we came up with the following points:

Materials development - costs:

• Time - on top of other professional duties, it takes time to make a good resource (between 15 minutes and 3 hours).
• Creativity - it can be difficult to come up with new ideas, and handicraft skills may not be some teachers' strong point.
• Money - stationery and craft supplies cost money; schools won't always refund costs.

Materials development - benefits:

• Time - 15 minutes spent making a sock puppet is worth tens of hours of classroom time; strangely, pupils will listen to a talking sock much more attentively than they will listen to a teacher. Even though the sock isn't even really talking.
• Creativity - our target audience is 6-9 year-old children. These children are easily impressed with the teacher's efforts. A balloon on a stick is a wonder to many children in this age group. They will not criticise our handiwork or creative effort; they will enjoy it! Children learn best through play and enjoyment.
• Money - re-usable materials (tin cans, plastic bottles, recycled paper from the photostat, cardboard boxes and general packaging) are easy to find. Some basic supplies can be bought quite cheaply, and schools will provide some tools and raw materials for teachers to use. The money investment can easily be recouped over many repeat activities with the teacher-made resource. Sharing resources with other teachers also adds more value to the initial money cost. And besides, love of learning is greater than ringgit and sen (within reason!).

To kick off the discussion, I shared my feeble efforts in materials development with the teachers. I used paper plates to make a memory game that integrates numeracy and literacy skills. The orange plates have a numeral drawn on the reverse, and the purple plates have the number written as a word (E.g. 0 / zero). It's very simple, but also very adaptable. Teachers at the workshops were able to suggest lots of ways to use the plates in different games and activities.

Even basic skills can be used to create cheap
and quick materials that can be used over
and over again in a variety of different ways.

The Challenge ...

I gave teachers from each school a pile of paper plates and asked them to cooperate with each other to make a resource that focuses on a particular language point from the curriculum. I also asked the teachers to make a another resource in a different medium (IT, write the rules of a game, a work sheet or handout) that uses the same language as the paper plate activity.

A few teachers have already accepted the challenge and made some fantastic resources for their English classrooms. I't's been a great week for school visits, and I'm looking forward to more of the same during March visits.

Stephen-Peter Jinks (ELC Jerantut)

Synthetic Phonics

Year 1 teachers have a very hard job teaching the sounds of the English alphabet (phonics) when the children are still processing their alphabet with the BM teacher (syllabic focus, but also phonics). Phonics can be a little bit confusing for young learners learning two similar (but different) systems at the same time, and the first steps can be daunting. I went to a Y1 phonics class at SK Kuala Tembeling this week, and the teacher was using 'synthetic phonics' from the very first class; this is the best thing we can do to help the young learners blend the separate phonics into English-sounding words.

Synthetic phonics is a way to make the consonant sounds without an accompanying vowel; so, instead of sounding the letter 'b' (phonic /b/) as buh...buh, we sound it as b' ... b' (try it: say 'b', but don't make an 'uh' sound after it). If we don't make the sounds of English consonants in a 'synthetic' way, but with an accompanying vowel, it sounds like this:
/b/ buh
/ɪ/ ih
/g/ guh
We don't get /bɪg/, we get buh-i-guh.

We also need to remember to leave off the ehh sound at the beginning of /s/, /f/, /l/, /m/ and /n/. 

What vowel sounds should we leave off /b/, /g/, /k/, /v/, /z/, /p/, /d/ and /dʒ/? 

Check out this video and listen to synthetic phonics 

Phonics as a foundation for reading: I also spent time with the Y3 reading teacher at SKKT. We talked about strategies for advancing reading skills beyond sounding out words and toward reading for meaning. We bounced around a lot of interesting ideas, and I'm looking forward to visiting the next reading class.

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Stephen-Peter Jinks (ELC Jerantut)