Eleni Vazaka

1. Eleni Vazaka Literacy • There has been a systematic effort since the beginning of the school year to deal with and tackle the problems of literacy in 4th grade classes with the assistance of Oxford Reading Tree series of books. • Accordingly our group of four teachers has been working together since then, sharing equally responsibilities and new ideas.

2. Connections with colleagues Briefly, the group: • meets on a regular basis to organize material ( handouts with comprehension questions, picture dictionaries, visual aids related to each ORT reader etc.) • is ‘arty’ so we use schemata when teaching new lexical items or grammar. • exchanged visits (when substitutions needed) or observed each other’s classes. • provides warm and cool comments during group gatherings.

3. Successes • Verbs, nouns and adjectives found in ORT books are displayed by St. in groups on the classroom board. Students: • realise the order Subject+Verb+Object • their active vocabulary bank has increased. • deconstruct a sentence by finding its parts ( v-n-a) • can construct their own sentences by taking words from each group.

4. Challenges • Sometimes not all combinations of words from the word banks (nouns-verbs-adjectives) made sense or had a clear meaning within the same sentence. • Words with abstract meaning were difficult to depict in a picture or schema easily recognizable. • Teachers’ guidance in making successful combinations was sometimes necessary.

5. Next steps • As this series of readers (ORT) continue in stages activities and games with new lexical items will go on next year. • Deconstruction of sentences ( breaking a sentence in its parts) can evolve next year into a more complex technique.