September 28, 2015
Reading sounds like fun
A Porirua educationalist says the key to her new teaching method is to work with the language children bring to school.
Joy Allcock’s Sounds Like Fun reading system is being trialed in low decile schools around Porirua, Lower Hutt and Wellington with great success, especially for Maori and Pasifika learners.
Ms Allcock says rather than assume children come to school knowing their alphabet and trying to teach sounds from what can be an abstract idea, they are asked to give a word and the teacher then shows them the letters that make the sounds.
She says working from sound to print seems to appeal to Maori children.
"They’re very tuned into the sounds of language. They have generally speaking great awareness of rhythm, which is the syllables in words, so we're working from a strength rather than an absence of something," she says.
Sounds Like Fun is being assessed by Massey University Institute of Education.
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