Educator's Development Program

The knowledge, skills, and practices of early childhood educators are important factors in determining how much a young child learns and how prepared that child is for entry into school. Early childhood educators are being asked to have deeper understandings of child development and early education issues; to provide richer educational experiences for all children. Keeping this in mind Gajera Trust had organized three days training session for all the pre primary teachers starting from 1st to 3rd September 2021. The resource person of the sessions was Mrs. Anshu Dua, a Synthetic phonics trainer and a curriculum developer of SAAR Publication.

Those three days we discussed on phonics refers to the method of teaching a student to read by developing their phonemic awareness and an understanding of the links between these sounds and how we use the letters of the alphabet to represent them. This understanding is essential not only to read well, but to bridge the gap between reading and writing.

With a good foundation of phonics knowledge, students can quickly become confident readers and strong independent writers. The use of phonics, or synthetic phonics and this method is technically known, is an effective and efficient means of teaching young students how to read. For this reason, phonics is the primary methodology for teaching reading in the school systems. Tasks were assigned to the teachers to prepare lesson plan based on best practices of Phonics in classrooms.

Sometimes phonics won’t be enough to decode some words. That’s why it is important for students to learn to read some words by sight alone. Sight words, or high-frequency words as they are also known, are those extremely common words used time and again in most texts. It was really a great course. Great presentation with lots of opportunities to ask questions and talk about real life examples which all made for a really enjoyable and informative course.