Support and evaluation of learning activities in educational settings

Teaching assistant in primary schools. Math and literacy: how to adapt lesson for lower ability group of children.

Working with primary children, particularly those who have difficulties in acquiring mathematical skills and literacy skills is a challenge. It demands several skills on my part: first of all understanding with and patience for the children, secondly willingness and ongoing interaction in developing my own skills in the subjects as well as attending courses and reading material that will enable me to develop new ways of imparting the subject to my students; originality and creativity; empathy for them; and also understanding their background (cultural as well as developmental) and going down to their level.

My practice involved listening to a child of low mental ability read. The child got stuck on a word that was snake, as the child was struggling to read the word I took the child back to basics, which was to use the phonics method. I asked the child to sound out the letters S-N-A-K-E. Teacher's feedback and later reflection told me that I could have used pictures to help the child with her reading, by having her look at the picture for the clue to the word. The method that I could have used would have been to get the child to point to the picture of the snake whereby this would prompt the association of the word. I could also try to decode the letters getting her to pronounce two/three letters at a time. If that did not help, we could return to using the sound actions for each letter. For example for the letter S, we would use our hand and move it as a snake would move, and hissing ("sss"). For the letter N, we would put our arms out like an airplane and say nnnnnnnnnn. This is an alternate way of fixing the letters in the child's mind.

As regards practical techniques that I have discovered, these include the following:

For math and for literacy, the same commonalities apply: making sure that the concepts come alive for the children, so that they understand the substance and context behind the lesson, be it numerical or literacy oriented. Both subjects must not be reduced to mental and tedious drill; rather they must be interesting and relevant to the child's life. He or she should understand the benefit that he accrues from studying the subject and, receiving a lot of praise, and rewards, be motivated to master it.

With both subjects, too, the content should become tangible. In other words, rather than pure verbal instruction and drill, play activities should be involved with a lot of kinesthetic, visual actions (since children lean by different means, some being more kinesthetic, verbal, or visual than others). In a similar way, the teacher, tuning in to the child's character should apply the content to that specific personality.

Manipulation (i.e. touch) should be used as often as possible. Better still, is when as many neural senses as possible are intensively involved in one go. Tangible feelings in math are when children, for instance, add block per block to a pile and then count how many have been added / reduced to the block.