Wesley seminar addresses literature and reading techniques
It is usual that you find students on the receiving end of the classroom. But today, it was quite the contrary for primary school teachers countrywide who convened at the Wesley School headquarters on Albert Street in Belize City for a four day seminar that is geared at preparing teachers for an easy transition to the next school year. General Manager of Wesley Schools, Pat Bennett explains how Wesley teachers are benefitting from this type of exercise where they are taught to sharpen literature and reading techniques.
Patricia Bennett, GM, Methodist Primary Schools
“Every year we have seminar workshops for our Methodist teachers and certainly we feel that at least once per year we should have some sort of teaching development for our primary school teachers so that for the year they can be refreshed, reinvigorated and ready to take on the challenges of the new school year which, as you know, will begin September one of this year. We believe, as is the case in many of our primary schools in Belize, that reading and literacy is a problem area and we feel that we wanted to focus on reading and literacy and certainly it is to provide our principals, our teachers with the skills, with the knowledge and perhaps an update as to how they can strategise, how they can work to make our children more efficient as readers.”
Kitts Cadette, Teacher of the Howard School in Atlanta Georgia
“I was asked to come do some training. I was asked by the Methodist church of the Caribbean and the Americas to work with the teachers in the elementary schools to help them or to provide them with tools that wild help them in the area of reading. So the purpose is to provide teachers with some of the strategies that they need. They have a wealth of strategies, so just to add to that base that they already have and because my area of specialty is in dyslexia and learning disabilities, I spent some of my time talking about dyslexia and the different types of disabilities.”
Luis Hernandez, Teacher, Corozal Methodist School
“I find it quite intriguing because the courses being offered are really relevant to the primary schools, things that we are encountering on a daily basis, not because we are teachers of a higher level or a higher standard better known as upper division. We don’t encounter these because some of the students do have problems. For example, what has been taught is the dyslexia and the phonemic awareness which has been a major problem between the different primary schools.”
The workshop concludes on Thursday.
