Last week the student teachers received their second Intensive Training Workshop (ITW). The workshop was attended by the OLA College of Education student teachers who are spending their placement year in the Fast-track Transformational Teacher Training programme classrooms.

The main focus of this four day workshop was literacy and the introduction of the phonics programme, which has been created specifically for Ghanaian kindergarten classrooms. The KG1 phonics programme is centred around various auditory discrimination activities, which helps to develop children’s listening skills. This provides children with a solid foundation with which they can begin to read in KG2. The KG2 programme introduces children to each of the sounds of the alphabet week by week, which they then use to read, spell and write simple phonetically regular words. This programme ensures that by the end of kindergarten the children have the necessary skills to move on to more advanced reading and writing in primary school.

The thorough training that the student teachers received equipped them with the necessary skills to begin teaching phonics in their classrooms, which is vital for building the literacy skills of kindergarten aged children. The workshop was enjoyed by all participants, with excellent participation and high enthusiasm from all. Excellent commitment was also shown by all of the OLA College of Education trainers.