In the month of December, Bookworm’s search and find book My Letters My words was working well with the younger children at the Bethesda Life Center, a MOP site that we visit once a week. We felt we must start some structured literacy activity work with the seniors so that they too could work on their reading levels.
Since the children are of varying reading levels and ages, we thought we could create simple exercises for them to do after the book browsing session. The purpose was to ensure that the children are reading with understanding and also to keep them hooked to independent reading.
We took inspiration for these activities from the Reading Challenge activities that were done in the LiS ( Libraries in School Program of Bookworm Trust) classes. The Reading Challenge was an activity we did over a month in our school program, setting small tasks for children in the classroom with independent reading.
We started with easy activities and then moved to more complex activities.
For this site, the material for browsing was more varied than the classroom. We used magazines like Nat Geo Kids, Highlights, Curious Owl newsletters, picture books and graded readers.
The children first worked on some letter and spelling hunts from the text, finding words corresponding to letters of the English Alphabet, doing a story web and finally we ended with dictionary work.
We noticed that at first it was difficult for the children to sit still and read a book on their own, but they showed complete concentration when the same independent reading was linked with an activity at the end. Somehow the purpose of independent reading becomes more clear. Slowly they started getting more interested in the reading of the books on their own, and were eager to do the activity.
The thing they enjoyed the most was working with the dictionaries. They required guidance while working with the dictionary the first time, but then once they understood how it works, they enjoyed it and did not ask for much help.
This has made me realize that even if the children struggle with reading, doing simple activities can help them achieve a sense of achievement which can then be used to build their interest in independent reading.