Korean Job Discussion Forums

butter808fly · Joined: 09 May 2004 Location: Northern California, USA

My students... I get 40 minutes a week with them, and a lot of them can hardly read yet they are in the 5th and 6th grades. Unfortunatly, I dont have time in my classes to teach them to read.

Does anyone have good ideas to help children read on their own? They should know basic sounds at least. I make them homework once a week and I would love to gear towards the students particularly, who are having problems with the basics of English. Once they learn how to read, they wont find my class, or English, so frustrating.

Thanx.

ajuma · Joined: 18 Feb 2003 Location: Anywere but Seoul!!

There's no way you can teach them to read by assigning homework. Spend 5-10 minutes at the beginning of each class teaching phonics. Sure, some of the kids will be bored, but they'll get SOMETHING out of it. If you're looking for a great phonics book, try Alpha Phonics by Samuel Blumenfeld. It's available from Whatthebook.com for 30,550...a little pricey, but well worth it!

butter808fly · Joined: 09 May 2004 Location: Northern California, USA

Thank you for the tip. Thats the plan. I do hope that some of my homework exercises will force them to at least try to read. They are scrambled words and word searches and word match games. Ones you can do without reading but are still forced to work with the words.

Is it foggy this morning or what?!

skindleshanks · Joined: 10 May 2004

Are there any studies out there on the value of wordsearches and crosswords? Do they actually stimulate beginning readers to recognize the letters and words? I suspect they do.
I'm in a similar jam as the OP, trying to help the 10-15% of grade 5 and 6 who can't read. I suspect they need more than 10 minutes a week.

butter808fly · Joined: 09 May 2004 Location: Northern California, USA

Well, since my original post Ive been using various little word games and such on homework. Even if the kids cant read, they can figure out the puzzles such as scrambled words/sentences, word searches and picture matching. The kids seem to enjoy it and no complaints that its too difficult. They seem more confident as well.

I dont know of any studies though...

mithridates · Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 5:48 am Post subject:

I'm pretty sure they do stimulate reading ability because of the fact that English speakers recognize works mainly by the first and last letters, and word searches help with that. I thnik eevrybdoy knwos abuot the sutdy taht shwoed taht raeding speed is the smae wehther the ltteres are in the rhtigt odrer or not, and it's true.

SuperHero · Joined: 10 Dec 2003 Location: Superhero Hideout

butter808fly · Joined: 09 May 2004 Location: Northern California, USA

wow, now isnt THAT interesting! Smile

Scott in Incheon · Joined: 30 Aug 2004

I did my masters work on teaching young people to read and write in a second language and I really can't see any use to using word searches to teach students how to read.

Reading being left to right...most of words in a word search are not really helping students to read.

Also reading could mean either adding meaning to a single word or putting words together to create meaning not simply recognizing the shapes of letters or the letters that are used to make up a single word.

Student during a word search might be practicing decoding...but not encoding therefore not truly useful for teaching reading.

ddeubel · Joined: 20 Jul 2005

well said........exactly my sentiments. Let's call wordsearches what they are --- fun, competition..... I get my kids to make their own and draw pics beside the words listed. They hand it to another, exchange. Then race to finish...Fun.!!! And they are learning a little more about writing...