Teachers prepare for new school year
Thousands of primary school children countrywide are grudgingly watching the calendar as the count down to the proverbial burning of the free paper quickly approaches. But while the boys and girls are enjoying their last days of freedom, teachers in Belize City have been hard at work, brushing up on their skills. An intensive two-week course for infant, middle and upper primary school teachers ended this afternoon for close to eighty teachers. According to organizers, this third of its kind workshop, held at Holy Redeemer Upper School, provided participants with new concepts for the teaching of old subjects. At the same time it provided ideas for the new subjects that are being introduced to the curriculum for the first time this year.
Marcella Gill, Facilitator
“Most teachers were enthusiastic about the reading recovery program. They are eager to incorporate aspects of reading recovery into their classroom because reading recovery on its own is a one to one program, teacher and student. But because these teachers have large classes, they will only be able to use portions of the reading recovery program.”
Q: “How is that going to detract from the original intentions of the whole idea?”
Marcella Gill
“Well reading recovery is based on observing the child as the child works alone. The teacher will have to be creative and set aside time. It almost impossible but most teachers are willing to recreate their schedule and work toward bringing the at risk student on grade level.”
Joy Skeen, Stella Maris School
“Basically what I grasped most is in relation with Spanish, because I teach a group of hearing impaired children and it’s already difficult to get across the English language and I wondered how would I teach Spanish to hearing impaired children. And we came up with lot of little ideas that could be used. It’s just a matter of applying basically the same method for the English language, would apply for the Spanish language.”
Marlett Martinez, St. Luke Methodist School
“Actually it served as a refresher for myself since I teach at an upper school, the topics that were covered for the last two weeks have been very challenging for me. They have served as I said a refresher. If you were to look in the background you would see topics such as face and shapes and graphs and statistics. We were informed that the curriculum will be taking on a new face and therefore our various facilitator for this workshop thought it would be good to start covering the areas that would be focussed on the new curriculum.”
These new areas include the teaching of Spanish, music and computers in the primary school. The introduction to computers course was facilitated by Syscomp. The two week teacher development workshop was sponsored jointly by the Urban Education Management Council and the Belize City branch of the National Teachers’ Union.
