Strategies To Teaching Spelling

Strategies for success

All children can be taught to be super achievers.

HOW to turn your child into a super achiever overnight. Sounds like one of those self-help books you might find on the shelf marked “Motivation” in the bookshop. Except that this is a real-life drill, in which kids get to go for a four-day camp to initiate a change in their lives and inch them nearer towards being a more successful individual.

During this Superbkids/Superbteens programme, children from the ages of nine to 19 are put through a series of training modules whereby they learn study methods such as speed reading, visual spelling, information gathering and mind-mapping as well as “life skills” like how to be more confident and managing time better. Essentially, it aims to “transform” children and help them change their mindset so that they know “how to handle life”.

Praveen Sherman from Chennai, India, came up with the programme eight years ago together with two other associates. The Superbkids/Superbteens programme uses techniques based on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), an alternative therapy based on a study of the structure of subjective experience, which seeks to educate people in self-awareness and effective communication.

Praveen, 32, formerly had a comfortable job working as a business analyst in India.

“The money was good but I didn’t have job satisfaction. Later, I attended an NLP course, and decided that motivating and training was more my thing,” he explains during an interview at a recent Superbkids/Superbteens camp, one of several conducted in Kuala Lum­pur by his company each year since 2006.

He first started with motivational courses for adults before he was inspired to create a programme for children.

“Parents who attended my training benefited from it and suggested that I expand the programme to tailor one for children. I took a year to map out the programme, and more than half of that period went into the planning. I wrote to Tony Buzan, the originator of Mind Mapping, and obtained his permission to include that aspect in my programme, with specific guidelines provided by him,” says Praveen, who has a Master’s degree in computer studies and another in business management from Pondicherry Central University in south-east India.

Generally, the programme focuses on practical memory strategies. By using tools such as pictures, colours, rhythm, humour and shapes, it becomes easier to remember details.

Why Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) Doesn't Work | Pennington ...

According to the Report of the National Reading Panel (2000), the experimental design studies on SSR indicate no statistically or educationally significant differences between those students who do SSR and those students who do not. Now, to be fair, the reading research does not invalidate SSR. There are just too many variables to isolate and no teacher would ever agree to participate in a study in which a control group of students was not allowed to read.

Some educational researchers have criticized the findings of the National Reading Panel, arguing that long term correlational studies do suggest that students doing SSR gain more in reading than those who do not. However, correlation does not imply causation.

My take regarding reading research is that we should prioritize our instruction to focus on the instructional strategies that both experimental design and correlational studies support. In other words, let’s teach what works for sure. in the day to achieve the results desired by proponents of SSR. For example, to achieve year to year vocabulary growth, elementary students need to read a minimum of one million pages; secondary students need to read a minimum of two million pages. Do the math. Many secondary teachers only have four hours of class time per week. No conscientious secondary teacher would allot half of instructional time to SSR. True that many students read in other content classes and some outside of school, but also true that with normal instructional interruptions there are many weeks with less than four hours of class time. In other words, an hour of SSR per week is just not going to make much of a dent in the amount of independent reading that students need to achieve significant reading growth. The “some is better than none” response is just not acceptable.

Additionally, all instruction is reductive: teachers cannot add on without taking away. Should elementary teachers give up teaching science or social studies to add on SSR? Of course not. Furthermore, with the increasing rigor of the language and writing strands of the ELA/Reading Common Core State Standards , both elementary and secondary teachers will be hard-pressed to teach the grade level standards and differentiate instruction as mandated.

. Students often choose books with reading levels far below or far above own their reading levels and so do not experience optimal reading growth.