Just before the Easter break, OLA College of Education held its second Intensive Training Workshop for their final year Early Childhood Education students. Organised and run by OLA themselves, this workshop focussed on improving the students’ expertise in teaching literacy for both KG1 and KG2.

The ability to read and write with comprehension is clearly integral to a successful education, so it’s vital that the teachers understand how these competencies develop and how best to encourage their students.

Right from KG1, Fast-track Transformational Teacher Training (FTTT) classrooms start engendering the necessary skills in pupils for reading and writing, from auditory discrimination games to hone the ability to hear different sounds, to scribbling to develop fine motor skills. Once pupils reach KG2, a more structured phonics programme is introduced to their daily timetable, where pupils learn to associate the graphemes (letter shapes) with their corresponding phonemes (letter sounds) and blend those sounds together to make simple words.

Phonics is always filled with lots of songs, rhymes and games to help children remember, so it was certainly a lively workshop with lots of interaction to keep the student teachers awake at the end of a busy term!