Language is obviously a vital tool. The importance of language is essential to every aspect and interaction in our everyday lives. Language learning and teaching under the guidance of Ms.Sonika Kaushik and Ms.Kaye Jacob (Principal of Heritage School) gave me many insights and which I can incorporate this learning in my teaching practice. Language teaching is an art and aim of the language is to develop analytical skills, critiquing, values, reasoning because its development never happens in isolation. So for language development other subjects can also be intergrated. literacy means reading and writting, but new literacy means reading and writting with digital technology, so being a teacher I should can encourage technology for language development but at the same time make students aware to use the technology with responsibility.
In language classes we learned importance of teaching Literature is to develop imagination in a child, designing comprehension questions which gave me hand holding of things and feedback in between clarified the doubts then and there. In Comprehension part, schools usually focus on recall questions but as teachers we should take advantage of this platform and enable our students to broaden their horizons by practicing four types of questions- question which has answer right there in the text, questions which encourage to think and search, questions to undertand what author is trying to say, and lastly questions which you can relate on your own experience. Think and search gave a child a scope to exercise on thinking faculty of mind, which help later in life to analyze thinks well. Own your question give a child chance to voice out their thoughts.
There are multiple ways of interpreting a text, a teacher should not force one viewpoint but take the responses of children. With this a child will explore something of his own and draw significance and create meaning. By forcing one opinion we sort of end the spectrum of critical reading and thinking. Annotation plays important role to understand the text. Decoding or deciphering a code and fluency are central to reading. Modeling of reading should focus on reading in chunks, reading slow, underline what I know, circle the unfamiliar words and notes in the margin, students can master the art of annotation with enough exposure. Reading is an active process in which the reader constructs meaning from an alphabetical code by interacting with text. The basic idea should be read, re read, think, talk to get the main idea.
Trait of authentic writing is engagement, a child must learn to wrestle with his writing and teacher should guide a child how to write for purpose and style. Structure, content, word choice all these important aspects should find place in the writing piece of a child. 6 important traits for writing are -Ideas—the main message, Organization—the internal structure of the piece, Voice—the personal tone and flavor of the author's message, Word Choice—the vocabulary a writer chooses to convey meaning, Sentence Fluency—the rhythm and flow of the language. Conventions—the mechanical correctness. Monitoring, modeling and guidance from teacher’s end help a child in achieving writing skills.
Math as a subject used to terrify me during my schooldays. But I found my daughter a big fan of math, because she learnt it completely differently the way I learnt. After meeting and having sessions with Shah ji I realized how important is to teach Mathematics and specially to develop interest towards it. The higher aim to teach math is to develop the child to think and reason mathematically, to pursue assumptions to their logical conclusion and to handle abstraction. It includes a way of doing things, and the ability and the attitude to formulate and solve problems. I also realized I have learnt mathematics in abstraction, none of the topic in visuals. However it’s so important to make each context interesting and visual. Visualization and representation are essential skills a mathematician should have. Mathematical concepts can be represented in multiple ways, and these representations can serve a variety of purposes in different contexts. The aim should be to develop arguments, evaluate arguments, make and investigate conjectures, and understand that there are various methods of reasoning. Enable the child to reach the correct answer using different strategies. Here in IAAT we have re-visited all the concepts again I realized I never understood them the way I did during the sessions. It is also important to make the topic’s context relevant to children’s life, it should not be alien. Near to far principle applies here as well.
