Teachers improve literacy skills

Earlier in the week we reported on activities at the Leo Bradley Library to promote reading by Belizean children. Today a workshop concluded in Belize City that will help teachers build those skills in the classroom. News Five’s Jacqueline Woods has more.

Rosanna Briceño, Facilitator, Literacy Workshop
“We don’t want to really blame one particular set of people or the family or the government or whatever. We want to say that some times our teachers are not equipped, they are not prepared, they don’t have the strategies on how to actually teach reading.”

Jacqueline Woods, Reporting
Today the management of Anglican Schools held closing ceremonies for its annual literacy workshop. This time however, the activity focussed on the middle division and what teachers can do to help those students excel in their examinations and become better readers.

Carol Babb, Manager, Anglican Schools
“The last three years we were focusing on the infant division. Our first test revealed that our children were reading very poorly. I am very proud to announce that our children are doing a hundred percent better as a result of all the workshops and the monitoring and the interventions that we have done.”

“The whole idea for this workshop is to ensure that our teachers have skills to take back to their classrooms to ensure that our children are reading to learn. At the infant division they were learning to read; now they should be reading to learn about the world, about other people and things like that.”

Today the teachers had on display examples of the various techniques they will be using in the classroom. The teachers say getting the children to read is only one part of the problem. According to Sharee Gutierrez, it is equally important to help students learn to understand what they are reading.

Sharee Gutierrez, Teacher
“We don’t have a problem to say that they can’t read. They can read and they know their phonics. But we have a problem when it comes to comprehending what they have read. And I believe that if you can read phonetically and if you can’t comprehend, then you can’t read. It’s useless for real life if you can’t understand what you’ve read. So with that problem at my school and with the knowledge that I have gained here, I know that we’ll have a better crop of students as the years move along and we’ll see the results in exams and as they move on to high school and into real life.”

Gutierrez not only told us how she plans to help her students, but offered a tip to other children.

Sharee Gutierrez
“Like having games, teaching them how to be independent readers and teaching them how to read a book and to answer their own questions… Having them, when they read alone, they write the questions in their book that they’re reading and then you go back, you read on to try to answer it and if you still don’t find it for that question, then you go back and re-read what you’ve read, and in that way you’ll find a way to answer your question. And if that still fails, then you can call your teacher and then he or she will help you to comprehend what you have just read.”

Seventy-five teachers from across the country attended the literacy workshop. Jacqueline Woods for News Five.