Phonics in India

One of our main jobs at Shunem is working with the kids on their English reading skills. We recently introduced a new phonics program with the kids.  The odd thing about learning to read in India is that it is all about memorization. In school the kids will simply repeat “c-a-t cat” until they memorize how to spell it. The kids who are particularly good at this can read fine, and the smarter ones even figure out some letter sounds. However, most kids have no idea what to do if they encounter a new word. The common practice upon seeing a word they haven’t memorized is simply guessing a word that might be in the story. For example, if they are reading about the winter olympics and they encounter the word bobsledding they wouldn’t know it. So, they might guess “olympics?”

The other odd thing is teaching kids from the age of 5 up to 15 the sounds that letters make. All kids from kindergarden to 9th class are in phonics every morning. They are divided into four age groups, which move at slightly different paces respective of age. I (Colton) just finished vowels with my 7th-9th class students, and I hope that with some review in the coming months they will actually all understand them by the time we leave. The 4th-6th class has not learned their vowels after several weeks, and we will probably just move on and review along the way. They act up way too much.

Emily teaches the 2nd and 3rd class, and her biggest struggle is their behavior and tendency to not listen.  First, all of the girls love teasing one girl in particular because she really struggles with reading, writing, and speaking English.  It has gotten so bad that the girl being teased has cried at least 5 times during phonics class. Because they do it in Telugu Emily can’t really stop it while its going on.  Second, on certain days all of the girls decide to not like each other and they refuse to work in groups together.  No matter how angry she gets with them they just won’t do it. So so stubborn.

We have high hopes for these kids, though. No matter how slow they seem we have to remember that for many of them they are learning to read and write a third language. English has 26 characters that are always playing tricks on you, their other languages have 200ish characters that you can count on. I don’t know which is more frustrating.

Meet the classes…

Our craziest students – LKG and UKG

Emily’s group – first, second, and third class

Colton’s first class – fourth, fifth, and sixth

Colton’s other class – seventh, eighth, and ninth