The School Management arranged a workshop on “Phonics” for Amrita Nursery and Primary teachers on December 2, 2017. The workshop was conducted by Mrs. Anjali Varadkar, who is the Founder of Magic Box Academy, Vashi and comes with an experience of around 15 years in teaching. Mrs. Varadkar began the workshop by saying, “Phonics is the link between what we say, what we read, and what we write.”
The workshop emphasized synthetic phonics which is based on the letters and sounds of the alphabet. The teachers were exposed to the 26 letter sounds with the actions (a says /a/, s says /s/, etc.), Blends (e.g. sa, cl, st), Diagraphs (two letters coming together to make a new sound like oo, oa, ai), Tricky words (e.g. to, she, be, some, come), Schwa words (mother, banana) and counting methods to break down big words.
Mrs. Varadkar also spoke about the challenges faced in a multi-lingual country like India where pronunciations change from region to region.
The teachers learnt fun and novel methods to make pronunciation easy for the children, and were very keen to introduce these new methods in their classrooms. The session ended with teachers acting like children and singing a song, “Making melody in my heart”.
