“Continuous professional development is a regular feature on the road to excellence.”

Shri Ram Global School organized a hands-on workshop on Linguistic Skills by Fitzroy Programs. It aimed at enhancing students’ phonics awareness and communication skills. The event featured a series of captivating activities that provided valuable insights into the importance of ‘phonic sounds’, ‘colours’ and being a facilitator instead of a teacher for the students.

The workshop focused on treating language as a skill and not as a subject because one can fail in a subject but not in a skill. Fitzroy Readers are designed for the gradual understanding of phonic sounds and practising it simultaneously.

The role of a facilitator is to make a child associate the image of a letter with its sound. Every word is divided into two parts: Name and Sound, the alphabets are divided into 42 sounds, 144 combination and 30 spelling rules and a child has to be taught eighteen combinations and three rules every year in order to achieve a cumulative and holistic learning outcome.

Fitzroy Reader focuses on four aspects: Controlled Vocabulary, Readers and Storybooks, Real stories and fun white learning the language. The workshop elaborated on the three Cs of classroom teaching: connect, conduct and conclude.

There were various activities that helped the facilitator understand the sounds and vibrations of the letters. The activities taught how to understand the lip, tongue and mouth positions for every phonic sound. The facilitators learned the five skills of language: learning the letter sounds, learning letter formation, blending, identifying sounds in words and special or tricky words.

The facilitators learned to make corrections during classroom teaching by making coloumns for phoneme and graphine in notebooks and make the child associate one with the other. At last the educators were given the homework to practise the exercises taught in the workshop and ‘Fitzroy Word Skills’ in order to master their skills.