As the children came back, I really wanted to focus on slowing things down and doing things right. My first step was not putting the pressure on myself to hit every curriculum area in a single day but instead integrating the curriculum areas to create rich learning experiences. Another thing I have made a conscious decision to focus on was giving myself more time to teach and students more time to learn.
One of my examples of this has been during my Yolanda phonics lesson. After attending the Yolanda phonics course and observing other teachers carry out their phonics lessons I have established a daily phonics routine that works for me and my learners. Instead of rushing through a quick 10 minute lesson of phonics every morning, I have extended my phonics lessons to 20-30 minutes. We do a letter of the day, we talk about the sound and try the corresponding action (e.g. the vibrating throat). As a class we go through the 5-6 words starting with that letter which we will later recall. We write a sentence for each word and 4-5 students get a chance to read the sentence before we read it as a whole class. We do this for each word. In 2 short weeks, I have found a drastic improvement in their sentence structure that has transferred to their writing. The extra time spent in my phonics lesson has made writing more enjoyable for the students and given me the chance to focus on different areas of students writing.
Below, on the left, is an example of one of my ESOL students in late Feb before the lockdown. On the right is her work after a week of specialised phonics. Both pieces of work were written independently with a whole class discussion prior.
