Hello, Summer Reading Camp!

I am both fortunate and at the same time challenged as this is my first time to be a camp mentor for a literacy program in our school.

The aim of the program is mainly to intervene children who have difficulty in reading. Stressing the importance of reading, we all know that without reading ability, many areas of the academic life of children are hindered.

During our first day of reading camp, we assessed the reading abilities of the children to know the baseline where we will start our reading intervention. Surprisingly we observed that most of the children, even intermediate graders, failed to produce a sound given a specific visual symbol of the letter.

Such problem has roots not only to the usual lack of parental support, but also to how the teachers educate the children.

Sometimes teachers tend to misunderstand the developmental aspect of reading that they keep on teaching how to read a word without visual imagery and part analysis of what really comes out the mouth on the part of the children.

Reading, not parroting.

At other times, because reading is a very complex skill to develop and can be an intricate area to teach, teachers usually fall short of perseverance in developing children to be readers of their own.

Which leads to haphazard learning for the children.

It takes tons of patience but I hope that while taking this endeavor as a new journey for my teaching career, at the end I will most importantly be able to tap the reading abilities of the children to the fullest.