by Budi Ilhami
Teaching reading skill is usually boring. Moreover when we teach it in English for Children (EC) class. In this writing, I would like to share my experience of teaching reading in EC-6 class. The activity I used was reading game. To reduce the boring atmosphere, I modified the activity. There were 5 steps of the activity. They were grouping, introducing words, listening and shadowing, reading and giving punishment.
Grouping was the first step. There were 10 students in my class. I know it is almost impossible to make groups which consist of boys and giris. So, I made my class into 2 groups, boys and girls. Each group consisted of 5 students. I gave a number to each student, from 1 to 5.
The second step was introducing some target vocabulary. I used picture dictionary at the top of page in student’s book.
After that I read paragraph 1 and asked students to listen and shadow by heart. I repeated the activity once more to make students understood better. Then they discussed with the group how to read correctly.
The next activity was reading. To know which group who would read first, I asked 1 representative of each group to do ‘hompimpa’. I called the winner as group 1 and the looser as group 2. Later, Students had to read paragraph 1 in chain. So,
1. We started it by giving turn to student 1 of group 1 to read until he/she made mistake.
2. When student 1 made mistake he/she had to stop
3. I wrote the word mispronounced on the board and asked them how to pronounce correctly.
4. Next was student 1 of group 2’s turn to read until he/she made mistake, I wrote the mistake and asked them how to pronounce correctly.
5. Then I asked student 2 of group 1 to continue reading from the last word mispronounced by student 1 of group 1 and the same thing for next students until paragraph 1 was end.
6. The winner was the group which could finish reading first.
The last step was giving punishment to the looser group by giving talcum powder on their faces. This step made students felt excited, especially when they put the talcum powder on other’s faces, and motivated them not to be the looser. To be the winner they had to help one another in the group.
The reason I divided the activity into paragraph was not to make students to wait too long to be the winner and felt bored. Later, I did the same way for the next paragraphs.
To make the atmosphere more fun, I let students to put a little powder on my face and I had my pictures taken with them.
In conclusion, to make the atmosphere of teaching reading became fun I used reading games with a little modification. There were 5 steps in it. They were grouping, introducing words, listening and shadowing, reading and giving punishment. It is 1000% not harmful. If you are interested, please try it.
P.S: if there are similar techniques and details, they are only coincidences
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