Belize District reading project passes with flying colours
This morning, more than thirty teachers gathered in Belize City for a professional development conference designed specifically to share creative ways of making reading fun. The local initiative will include primary school teachers countrywide. News Five’s Karla Heusner was on hand this morning as officials shared the results of the pilot phase conducted in schools in the Belize District.
Dr. Corinth Lewis, President U.B.
?I know you are all able to apply practices that demonstrate that a ?one size fits all? approach does not work when you work with your students, and that your students home and community context are also important, not as a means of stigmatising your expectations for your students, but to maximise the learning experience for them.?
Karla Heusner, Reporting
With examples of student art and writing as the backdrop, President of the University of Belize this morning congratulated teachers from six pilot schools for their hard work and enthusiastic commitment to reading. The initiative, being carried out at the infant two, standard one and two classes, is a joint effort of the Caribbean Centre of Excellence for Teacher Training through U.W.I., the Ministry of Education, and the University of Belize.
Rosalind Bradley has directed the project since 2003. She says the idea of the programme was to get kids hooked on books.
Rosalind Bradley, CCETT Rep., Belize
?We will find them in the classroom during break time, picking up books and reading on their own. So we have seen a change, a turnaround, where students are more motivate to read, they are more interested in reading. If the teachers for some reason would want to change the programme and not read for one particular day, students would be ?Miss, how come you did not read today?? So that kind of excitement and so on is very encouraging.?
Karla Heusner
?Do you think that most teachers regard reading as sort of a separate subject from everything else??
Rosalind Bradley
?That is a big challenge. One of the things we have found out in the schools is that many of the teachers and even the students perceive reading as a subject that we do at a particular time of the say or something like that. What we have tried to do is to do reading right across the curriculum and to show the students it?s not always reading and then to answer some questions, because that was the other thing too, you read and then you get a bunch of questions to answer. But that it?s about enjoying quality literature. Just sitting there enjoying a book, what do you like about this particular book? Why do you like it? Just talking about it and making it fun, getting them to dramatise it and you know just talking about it.?
Standard one teacher Sandra Smith is just one of the teachers trying to make reading fun.
Sandra Smith, All Saints School
?The visual effect from the pictures help the children to be more creative, they are seeing what is there, so it helps them to develop more with their comprehension and their writing skills.?
?The theme idea is very important and it helps them a lot because they can incorporate everything, integrate whatever they are doing across subject areas. And as you can see, they can do a lot with it and they have been very creative with it. They have booklets, they have their journals, they do creative writing, answering questions. It helps them a lot.?
Along with reading and writing comes vocabulary building. Toyin Atolagbe of Central Christian School says research has shown long lists of words presented out of context can be quickly forgotten.
Toyin Atolagbe, Central Christian School
?When you teach your students vocabulary, they have to learn it through wide reading, writing, minimal, not much of direct teaching, just a small amount of direct teaching. But usually a lot of indirect teaching: they read the story, look at the words and learn the words in context, make use of sight words, make sure you have a print rich environment for your children and that students make use of these words on a daily basis.?
Judith Reyes of Burrell Boom Methodist says not only are her children reading more, they are relating what they read to other subjects.
Karla Heusner
?A lot of these conferences focus on weaknesses and problems, this one seems to be focussing on some successes. How do you personally feel about the programme??
Judith Reyes, Burrell Boom Methodist
?Well, I have been with the programme, this is my third year, and I have found the programme to be very successful, there were some failures, but from year to year, you kinda work on those. But I have found the children are really interested in reading, or language arts on a whole.?
Rosalind Bradley
?We have found that in some schools the attendance has actually improved. Like in the mornings when we have language arts, the students are definitely there in the morning for that. One principal even said to me, ?We have to change because students are not coming back in the afternoon for maths!? So I said ?Well, you know what, we will have to do something for math as well so we can get them there the whole day!?
And to help the teachers better plan their schedules, the pilot schools were presented with a stack of reading books on method and research collected by Peace Corps Volunteer Audrey Spencer.
Karla Heusner for News Five.
The six schools currently participating in the reading programme are All Saints Primary School, Burrell Boom Methodist, Central Christian School, Guadalupe Roman Catholic School, Salvation Army School, and St. Luke’s Methodist.
