English Club

At the beginning of this school year, I taught the grades 3 and 4 together. A few lessons in, it became apparent that only one or two of the students in grade 4 could read anything at all, and none of the students in grade 3. This was a problem, because the topics and assignments in the government curricula for grades 3 and 4 clearly expected some level of literacy. I talked with ‘M’e Makoae, their class teacher, and she said it would be ok if I organized them into small groups and worked with them on reading and writing during the morning and lunch breaks. So, from about February on, I’d work with 3 or 4 grade 3 students during the morning break, and 3 or 4 grade 4 students during the lunch break.

We began by just copying out the alphabet a few times to get familiar with the letters, and then went on to working through the 7 sets of letter sounds I found in the grade 4 Teacher’s Guide. I’ll stress here that this English Club was not informed by any broad overarching strategy, and more by a sense of desperation that these students were far behind where they should have been, and it didn’t seem like anyone was going to do anything to get them back on track (because so much emphasis is placed on the results of the Primary School Leaving Examination that all grade 7 students take, the school values their instruction far more highly than that of the lower grades – often a student will coast through the early years without learning a whole lot, only to have a stressful final year during which they learn all of the grade 7 material in addition to everything they missed on the way up [this approach is in accordance with the principle that when you build a house, you don’t need to work too hard on the foundation, the floors, the walls, or the rafters, but you should make sure you have a really pretty roof (hope I don’t sound bitter!)]).

I can’t say then that this was an A+ effort on my part and all of the students who couldn’t read at the beginning of the year are now highly literate. It took us a while to find a groove in terms of making measurable progress. But there were positive effects. The students really seemed to benefit from the smaller-group instruction, which had the ancillary effect of making classroom management and learning during the scheduled English classes a lot easier. I got the impression that the students became more comfortable with me as a teacher because they’d gotten to work with me in another environment in which they could sort of understand what we were trying to do, rather than having their sole experience with me be the class time, where I may have just been the loud frustrated sweating man speaking in tongues.

By the end of the semester, a fair number of students (maybe half  of grade 4 and a quarter of grade 3) were able to read most of what they saw in the first portion of Hop on Pop. Progress! My favorite page of the book is of course “HE. ME. He is after me. JIM. HIM. Jim is after him.” It doesn’t get any better than that.

So we’ll see where the next semester takes us, but it’s been a fun learning experience.

"Ah, sir, you can draw!"

The coliseum.