Tamil Nadu - Madurai   

Reading the right way is rewarding

S.S. Kavitha

Workshop delves into vital skills for children

MADURAI: Of all the skills a child learns in its lifetime, reading and writing are the most vital ones, especially when the inquisitive mind is developing. But proficiency in reading and writing is declining fast in this fast-paced electronic age.

And, by the way, is English alone is the language of communication that had to be nurtured in a child? Certainly not; a child has to learn as many languages it can, believe the Rotary Laharry Matriculation Higher Secondary School people.

With a view to update and overhaul students' reading and writing skills, the school organised a special language workshop for students of I to VIII Standards in Tamil, English and Hindi.

The school organised the one-week workshop on the school premises and set apart the classes into various sessions and two groups. The students from Standards I to IV constituted Group-1 and those studying Standards V to VIII formed Group-2.

The modules

For inculcating reading skills, the workshop utilised modules such as introducing sounds, phonetic awareness, step-by-step practice stories, cognitive and responsive reading, and reading big books. The writing modules stressed on the writing process and formation of letters, diction, spelling, among other skills.The school had been organising the language workshop for its students for the last three years, said Anuradha Srinivasan, Vice-Principal.

She said that the school had been conducting the workshop to enable students understand the importance of language and skills since the popular tendency was to lay stress on science subjects even while slighting languages as inconsequential.

After all, students have to present their knowledge on other subjects through language. The unique feature of the workshop was that it would focus only on `what the children do right' and `not on what they do wrong,' said Ms. Anuradha.

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