LETOREA

I took a course during the pandemic last year and I couldn't be more grateful for the exposure to certain aspects of literacy methodology I was exposed to. I was also required to write a teaching philosophy. It talks about who I am as a teacher and the techniques that I employ when teaching my learners. Get ready to meet me. "TEACHING PURPOSE I had my first teaching experience during the one year mandatory youth service. I was ill-equipped since education wasn't my field of study. I spent the first few months trying to acquaint myself with my roles and duties while also delivering lessons using the guide I was given. It was challenging since I was taking over 100 students but, before the end of my youth service, I'd fallen in love with teaching. I teach because I have found it to be one of the most challenging, and at the same time, most fulfilling career paths. The ability to mould and shape; to groom and nurture; and help learners reach their full potenti...

Your child has familiarised herself with your voice since she was in the womb. She also comes equipped with the capacity to learn language. Reading is one of the first skills that a child should be equipped with. A great way to start teaching reading is from birth. Read to your child while she's in her crib and let her hold books as soon as she can. A torn book is a small price to pay for literacy. Read picture books and point at pictures in the book while you do so. Switch to books with texts and read aloud while your child sits on your lap, following with her eyes.  If you've been doing read-aloud sessions with your child since she could stare at a page, you can start teaching reading by age four otherwise, you can start teaching reading by age five. Most second and third children may be ready to read sooner because they've watched older siblings read. If a younger child shows interest in reading, you should oblige her. Children generally don't develop wri...

Reading is a receptive skill. learners of English as a second language need to be taught the skills of English language reading. They also need a variety of texts to improve reading competence and general language improvement. The following tips should help you as an educator effectively select texts and encourage good reading habits in your learners. Give Extra Readings . Supplementing readings in the textbooks provides an opportunity to bring new ideas into the lesson. this also gives learners exposure to a wide variety of texts connected to the topic. Give readers a reason to read Reading tasks which learners recognize as relevant to their studies are motivating. An appropriate task encourage s suitable reading strategies in learners. Use Questions Apart from the well known comprehension questions, try to go beyond and involve learners in the ideas bring the text: For example, you could ask them to state the author's purpose or tone. Encourage reading for pleasure. O...

A syllable can be defined simply as a unit that is larger than a phoneme but smaller than a word. It is an uninterrupted unit of sound which is formed by the opening and closing of the mouth. One of the easiest ways to learn to count syllables is to hum the word. For example: stable would be hm-hm, whereas mechanic is hm-hm-hm. A syllable consists of a syllable onset and a rhyme . The rhyme is made up of a nucleus (obligatory) and a coda (optional). A syllable consists of an obligatory vowel potentially surrounded by consonants. We can therefore define a vowel as a speech sound which functions as a syllable nucleus while a consonant is a speech sound which typically occurs at the margins of a syllable. It is important to note that what is referred to here are sounds and not letters of spelling. English syllables can consist of up to three consonants in initial position (as in str and) and as many as four in final position (as in gli mpsed ). A syllable which ends in one ...

BRING EVERYONE ON BOARD to get students to behave positively in your class get them involved in setting the rules and consequences of the class welcome all suggestions and then trim them down to the few that resonate with your classroom vision you should do this as soon as the term or session begins BE EMOTIONALLY INTELLIGENT even rules set and pasted for all to see so don't overstep the boundaries we set keeping this in mind it is important to work out your responses to transgressions even before they occur this way you will not be caught off guard and you will deal swiftly and calmly with any behaviour contrary to your classroom culture. REITERATE CONSEQUENCES AND FOLLOW THROUGH ALWAYS. Clearly explaining consequences which follow actions help students to understand what will happen if they go against the rules. Also ensure you always follow through on consequences. Failure to do this will make students pick up on it and use it against you don't be tempted to give...

Education for every child is a policy vision of mine. A world where every child has access to quality and qualitative education irrespective of race or socioeconomic status. This vision led me to join hands with a nongovernmental organization which is aimed at improving the quality of education available to pupils in underserved communities. The Nigerian government has has rolled out several educational polices and I believe that part of the reasons we still have not achieved the goal is because the government has always employed the top-down approach to policy making. This means that those at the helm of affairs do not have first hand knowledge of the needs of the people whose problem they intend to solve with these policies. I would use the bottom-up approach which allows those who will benefit from such policies participate actively in it's formulation and implementation. This way, everyone has a a sense of belonging and they would preserve the infrastructures put i...

There's a growing trend in private schools in Nigeria. The goal is to make learners speak in a certain kind of way. I'm all for good pronunciation and enunciation of words and they're few things I like better than listening to learners speak fluently. However, the focus seems to be on making them sound a certain way and effort is made to make them lose what we tag their 'accents'. While this is not bad in and of itself, I think we should let this learners embrace who they are. The way we speak is strongly connected to our identity and when we make learners speak a certain way, they take on another identity, they become someone else. I am more polite when speaking my native language because I usually have to pay particular attention to body language, tone and other paralinguistic elements. For other people, such as individuals who are not very literate, they are more polite when they have to speak in English because they do not have a full grasp of the la...

The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension. Comprehension means understanding or making inferences from what you have read. When learners read for comprehension, they engage in several complex cognitive processes. The learners are using their phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading strategies to construct meaning from the text. Reading comprehension is a complex process; therefore, learners do not develop the ability to comprehend texts quickly, easily or without explicit instruction. It is important to help them develop critical thinking skills. Critical thinking skills are ways of thinking about topics or content in novel and insightful ways. The good news is that critical thinking skills can be developed over time with explicit instruction. One of the ways to do this is to use Bloom's taxonomy. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a widely-used tool for writing lesson objectives and learning standards. It provides a variety of outcomes pupils are expected to ...

Reading fluency is the ability of learners to read text with speed, accuracy, expression and comprehension. Learners with low reading fluency may find it difficult to comprehend what they are reading. This is because all of their attention is focused on sounding out the words with little attention to the meaning of the words.  Reading fluency depends on a number of well-developed skills which include accuracy (the ability to correctly read words by sight or decoding), rate (the speed of reading), prosody (reading with expression so that it sounds just like talking in everyday conversation), and comprehension (understanding the meaning of the text). To read words accurately, a learner should have a good understanding of the rules of spelling, be able to recognize and reproduce sounds, use context clues to identify words in a text, and have a large sight word vocabulary. Educators can measure reading rate using Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM). This is the number of wo...