Hi, everybody!
I am new here and this is my first blog.
my name is Nino Kerashvili and I am an English teacher of
a village school in the south of Georgia, Javakheti region.
I am 50 and I have a daughter and a granddaughter.
I like reading and watching films on the internet.
I want to share some ideas from my school experience.
How to teach English Alphabet to your pupils using Letter Cards
As
there are 26 letters and 44 sounds in English. It's difficult for learners to
learn first the names of the letters and a lot of rules and then to differ the
rules and the names from each other.
For
example some little pupils cannot understand why a letter "C" reads
differently, sometimes [s] and sometimes [k].
So to
say it clearly why letters and sounds differ from each other, or why two
letters are read together as one sound, for example the letter-combination
"sh" is read as [ʃ ].
The
main reason of searching the answer to the above-mentioned question about
difficulties is that I began working in another school where there was not a
teacher of English for two years before I started working there. The situation
was very bad. Most of the pupils of upper classes didn't know all the letters
and I had to teach the Alphabet to all of them.
The
first thing I did was that I printed all 26 letters, glued them to the
cardboard separately.
It's like this:
Then I
tried to teach the names of the letters according to the similar pronunciation. I divided all the letters in seven groups.
Like this:
The
first: Aa Hh Jj Kk
The
second: Ee Bb Cc Dd Gg Pp Tt Vv
The
third: Ff Ll Mm Nn Ss Xx Zz
The
fourth: Uu Qq Ww
The
fifth: Ii Yy
The
sixth: Rr
The seventh: Oo
The seventh: Oo
Then I began to teach them the letters from the first group. I asked three pupils to come to me and told them that the first one should name the letters. If he/she made mistakes, the second one should name the above-mentioned letters correctly. When the first one finished naming I asked him to write the letters in his notebook and learn. then the second became the first , the third became the second and I asked one more for the third role.
That was very joyful for them. The process of learning took little time as all the pupils from the class took parts in it simultaneously.
Then I took the second group and and so on.
At last when somehow we finished all the groups I asked each student to mix the letters and tell the names of all the letters.
The game was the same as with the groups of letters.
It was fun. The pupils just liked such type of game very much.
I played this game with all classes.
After some time I try to play it (once in two months) with all of them at the end of the lesson.
So this is my experience and I think it is not a bad idea for you to do it in your classes.
I am finishing it here and I will share some more ideas from my experience time by time.
With great respect to you Nino Kerashvili
