Shared Reading

Peer Assisted Learning 

PAL 2015 Jerantut - PAL is Back!

Almost half of Mohd Hanafisah bin Jusoh's Year 3 English class at SK Jerantut Jaya are LINUS pupils. Today we took the 3I class to the library and practised 'shared reading'. Teacher Hanafisah paired a LINUS pupil with a non-LINUS friend and gave them English books to read together. The teacher and mentor moved around different pairs of readers keeping them on-task and helping out with difficult words, but mostly, the pupils were focused on the task and enjoying reading together.

Reading Together at SK Jerantut Jaya

Peer Assisted Learning

In this case it was peer assisted reading. Both teacher Hanafisah and the mentor kept the children at their reading tables by carrying a pile of books as we moved from pair to pair. Whenever a particular pair finished reading, we just took their book from them and replaced it with one we had in our pile. I have learnt from previous PAL reading projects that if they are given the chance to replace their own books from the shelves, after only ten or fifteen minutes or so a lot of the children will spend more time running back and forth to the shelves than actually sitting down and reading!

We allowed the children around 35-40 minutes of reading time, and the last fifteen minutes or so were spent writing their NILAM reports. For a full-on reading programme at school, we would need a lot more English books than most school libraries could provide, but reading is just one aspect of Peer Assisted Learning; other opportunities for shared learning can be found in shared writing, junior mentoring at school events (like funfairs or English days), team-building and parental involvement.

The Jerantut cluster mentors are very keen to do more PAL work in more schools in 2015, so please let us know if you have any ideas for other shared learning projects we can help you with. Have a look through this blog, as well as the Brighton PAL blog to see if there are any ideas that particularly appeal to YOU.

You can find Brighton's PAL blog HERE

Stephen-Peter Jinks (ELC Jerantut)