Teacher Discussion Forums

dear all,

I'm a trainer for english teachers. I plan to give training to English kindergarten and elementary school teachers. The topic is about how to develop instructions in order to make students aware of English language printing form as (the spelling of ) English is very different from Indonesian language. Are there any suggestions for fun and communivative activities to present this topic and sample activities that can be given to the school students ?
I am looking forward to having the ideas.

regards,
R.H. Ria

Ok, but what is language printing form? Are you talking about the way English words are spelled? And thus techniques into making students better spellers?

Yes.. What I mean is that students will be able to spell (and pronounce ) words easier and better because of the different ways of pronouncing alphabets ( English-Indonesian ).

Maybe you're asking for information on phonics. Phonics is term meaning 'of sound.' It has come to be used to describe the system of alphabet arrangement and the sounds they represent in the English language.

You can find phonics information, games, cards, etc. all over the web. Here is a starter:

www.mes-english.com/phonics.html
www.booglesworld.com/phonics.htm
www.englishraven.com/Phonics.html

If you search 'phonics games' or 'phonics activitites' I'm sure you'll get more than you were looking for.

I hope that helps.

Mark
www.mes-english.com

I had lots of success teaching pre-literacy skills with Kindergarten children in Thailand using a method I posted in this site's Cookbook called 'Peter's Kindy ABCs'. It works partly because the children are also uniquely in their school career, learning to write Thai script at the same time in other classes. They therefore have the opportunity to grasp conceptually the notion of a written form of language through the radical difference of the two new written forms they are learning. I also made bilingual picture matching worksheets and various other dual language matching activities to further take advantage of this and even found the students writing and reading better in English than Thai. I also had Thai students (aged five years) better able to form their letters than English speaking five year olds! Remember that children of this age have formidable memories and pattern recognition skills. This should never be underestimated when judging their capacity to acquire the new written forms.

Hi
I don't know if this will help, but the following link has lots of lessons that you can do with Kindergarten students. You can click on lessons to do with alphabet, sounds, spelling, punctuation and so on. They are all fun lessons too, so that should be good. I personally think this site is great for ideas.
http://www.lessonplanspage.com/LAK1.htm
Let me know if you need anything more specific.

Fahima

If you're worried about spelling only, I'd start with simple words that follow the rules. In first grade, we start with simple lists like HAT, CAT, BAT, SAT, FAT, etc. Each list has a theme (usuall rhyming like above).