Phonics training

What an amazing rewarding experience training the SSIT and Oro lecturers proved to be! Lea was a great help-drawing pictures, photocopying and making flash cards and keeping me calm! Ayo, who is part of the office support, was great too with photocopying at the last minute. This man is amazing-he seems to know when energy level are low and appears with packets of biscuits and dashes around buying sim cards for us and even got my watch strap fixed for 30N. There was a lot of preparation as I tried to make the training as practical as possible-I even made a snake puppet.

On the first day we arrived at the college to find not 20 participants but 24! Extra snack and lunch had to be sent for! We began with a game and a song from the Letters and Sounds and everyone joined in with gusto! Never again will there be doubt as to the importance of sounds as opposed to letter names when teaching phonics! The real highlight was on day two when I showed them how to play sounds bingo, What’s in the hat, Matching and Silly sentences. Each group had to prepare and teach one of these games. To say they were competitive when doing the Bingo is to put it mildly! My teacher friends in the UK would have been amazed at the enthusiasm and seriousness they put into this session and what great fun we all had! On the third day we tackled ‘split digraphs’-they were so interested and willing it was really rewarding. In the afternoon they discussed how to incorporate the training into their own work. The SSIT will use it to train the head teacher cluster groups who in tuirn train the class teachers. The lecturers are incorporating it into their learning programmes for the student teachers. It was a very lively training and I was asked loads of questions and challenged on lots of issues but they were so appreciative. I was thanked many times and told it was the best training some of them had had! We finished by playing ‘The yam is in the Bag’-bit like ‘The Farmer in his den’-which involved two of the SSIT racing around the room and a lot of noise! This is definitely the best experience yet. I felt so touched when so many were thanking me and saying how much they had learned. I know why I came here now!

In the evening it was Harold’s birthday so we went round to Emma’s for chips and moin moin and ice-cream and cake-delicious!