Spark English Reader - Preface

Spark English Reader

Teacher's Manual

Book I – VIII

Editor

Prof. Dr. Tirth Raj Khaniya

Authors

Krishna Prasad Subedi

Subhash Giri

Dipak Marahatta

Shubharambha Publication P. Ltd.

Kathmandu, Nepal

The Teaching Guide for the Spark English Coursebook Series is © copyright Shubharambha Publication Pvt. Ltd, 2012.

This Teachers Guide may be printed out and used in an educational institution by educators and students free of charge. Particular activities included under each chapters may be printed out or photocopied for groups of students as classroom handouts free of charge. 

Spark English Reader Teacher's Manual

Publisher                     : Shubharambha Publication P. Ltd.

©                                 : Publisher

Edition                        : First Print 2012

Layout                         : Ranjeet Shrestha

Preface to Teacher's Manual

Spark English Coursebook blends the best techniques from proven language teaching methodologies into a program that creates confident, autonomous English speakers. Spark English is a complete English course for primary and middle schools which provides a clear, structured progression from kindergarten to class eight. At the kindergarten level, the course consists of two primers, A and B. The primers can be used in schools where children have had little exposure to the English language. Reading and writing are introduced mostly through visuals and patterns. In the Students’ Books at each level, there is a gradual but progressive development of the students’ listening, speaking, reading, comprehension, and writing skills. The Workbooks and Grammar Practice Books provide further exercises to consolidate the grammar and language structures covered in the Students Books.

Child-friendly and infused with energy, humour, and enjoyment, the salient features of the present edition include:

·         Student’s reading ability and comprehension skills are enhanced with graded texts and related exercises at each level.

·         The books have been structured to promote self-learning in students.

·         At the primer levels, the books focus on oral activities. This gradually extends to reading whole words and sentences and finally on to writing.

·         Ample word exercises are provided to increase understanding and usage of vocabulary.

·         Different aspects of language such as grammar, syntax, structure, punctuation, etc. have been emphasized with the help of text and related tasks.

·         Listening and speaking skills of the students have been developed by listening to interesting and comprehending text, ample class discussions, and a variety of oral and research activities.

·         A list of words used in the book has been provided at the start and end of each lesson for vocabulary practice.

Spark English Reader Series is a coursebook specially prepared for students who need to improve their basic English skills along with literary language. Each book is packed with high-interest stories, poems, essays, plays and extracts from novels written by famous writers covering varied genres such as folktale, science fiction, letter, biography, newsarticles, and autobiography, to name a few. Selections in the Beginning - and Middle-level books are divided into a number of short, illustrated sections. Many of the chapters in the Series contain theme-related stories and poems. Each section in the Student Book is followed by a comprehensive four - part skills check that is developed to meet the needs to Nepalese students and is consistent with the general scope and sequence of ESL/ELT curricula as prescribed by CDC, Nepal.

Authors

About The Teacher's Manual

This teacher's manual has been written as a guide for using Spark English Coursebooks. The Coursebook is based on the important principle that langauge skills are primarily best mastered when language is presented in a meaningful context in a graded form. An important goal for this manual is to help translate this principle into classroom practice. Suggestions are also given to help teachers guide their students with the more general skills underlying language acquisition such as: deducing meaning from context, using words correctly, and reading for meaning.

The Teaching Guides offer excellent support to teachers. They contain useful suggestions on teaching techniques, and answers to all the exercises in the Students' Books and Workbooks, and Grammar Practice Books. In the teacher's manual, a new approach is introduced to the classroom. Under this approach, students should be encouraged to use the library, to read reference books, gather facts from resource persons, engage in peer learning and discussions or use the Internet resource whenever possible, all of which can be shownasc possible avenues to enhance learning.

The Spark English Teacher's Guide contains detailed instructions and activities for each reading selection in the Coursebooks. Complete pre- and post-reading activities and answers to all the student exercises are included. A set of eight placement testspapers from Grade I to VIII are also included. The manaul strictly follows the general layout of the Coursebook. The teaching material for each unit contains the following:

• Before you begin (Warming up) develops vocabulary, activates prior knowledge, and introduces the selection using graphic organizers, imagination and critical thinking, and language across the curriculm.
• Reading the Selection guides students through the material in small, easy-to-digest sections with modeling strategies, illustrations, examples, precise language, graphic organizers, and thinking out of the box.
• Let's find the facts (Check understanding) contains the answers to the student comprehension check.
• Let's explore the text (Understanding the text) provides suggestions for teaching the argumentative and opinion based activities.
• Discussion and Making Connections expand the above activities in bringing the classroom and text based knowledge and ideas out to student's real life and situations.
• Listening section has been thoroughly dealt with so as to help the student develop communicative competence and make the teacher's work more learner-centred and goal-oriented.
• Speaking section of the Coursebook consists of modal utterances of langauge functions to help ease the students' difficulty in developing speaking proficiency in English language.
• Writing section centres on inculcating a culture of creative writing among students. Wherever required, depending on the difficulty level of the students, useful ideas and writing samples have been included.
• Comprehension time allows students to generate their own responses after reading the prescribed texts at the end of every chapters. No suggestions has been provided for this section keeping in view the need to provide students some space for their personal and independent responses on how they view or perceive each literary discourse and make out their meanings.
• Model questions for Assessment check all language skills including vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension.

Teachers are encouraged to make choices from the many options available and to select activities that they think will suit the levels and interests within their classes. It should be remembered while reading this guide that each situation is different and that the comments, observations, and recommendations in it are the result of those experiences, which will have some similarities to your experience, but will not be exactly the same.

Although this guide shares some common practice in teaching-learning field, it was not written to be a blueprint for every teachers. Rather it is meant to help you develop a teaching strategy appropriate to your needs.

We hope you will find this manual useful and that it helps you deliver passionate, enthusiastic, and quality interactive education to your students.

Authors

April, 2012

General Instructions to the Teachers

On Teaching poetry:

Familarize your student with the conventions of poetry in written form:

As you may know, poetry is primarily an oral form, something intended to be heard rather than written. Yet there are conventions to be observed when poetry is written, and students should become aware of them. Ask the following questions about the poems in your class:

•        Is the poem organized by sentence or by line or by word only?

•        In what form is the first letter of each line—capital or lowercase? Have students glance at several poems to verify this convention. Some students may be aware of poets who deviate from this convention, E.E. Cummings for example, but, of course, this is a deviation from the norm.

•        Is the end of each line punctuated? If there is no punctuation, that is called a run-on line. If there is punctuation—a period, a question mark, a semi-colon, or a comma or any mark that calls for the voice to pause—it is called an end-stopped line.

•        Explain that these pauses are part of the way the poet controls the rhythm in the poem. If there is no punctuation, the poet wants the line to flow into the next line with no pause or with only a slight pause.

Exploring the music of poetry:

The rhythm or meter of a poem is established in part by where the stresses fall, by the pauses, by the length of the line, and by the pattern of rhyme. All contribute to the sound the poet uses in order to convey the meaning and the emotional impact that he is trying to communicate. Th e rhyme especially is an aid to memory. Remind students that, much like songs, poems are meant to be heard and remembered. Students have experienced these metric features of poetry, starting with nursery rhymes, but may not yet have been asked to identify them formally.

Teachers may wish to adapt some of the activities provided below for this study.

Suggested Activity - 1:

Students to look closely at the first stanza of the poem to familiarise themselves with the use of:

Rhythm: students can work in pairs or as a class to determine the number of beats per line. Draw their attention to how the momentum of the beats  is established.

Rhyme: students work out the rhyme scheme. Draw students’ attention to how the words that rhyme are connected in meaning.

Enjambment and punctuation: examine the poem with students for the creation of pauses, emphasis and the building of momentum.

Suggested Activity -2:

Ask students to list the key words and ideas in the poem that describe the main topic in the poem. They may need a dictionary to unpack these words for meaning. Discuss the poet’s choice of vocabulary and poetic technique to construct atmosphere and excitement.

On Teaching story:

Using the story sequence chart, help your student summarize the story into three parts. Ask the story sequence questions and help your student answer; his answers can be phrases. Below are suggestions for questions and possible answers.

Over time, your student can learn to retell the story in complete sentences using the chart for reference.

A.     Characters and Setting:	C.   Climax/Resolution
Who is in the story?          (Main Characters)	How is the problem solved?        What happens after?
What do they look like?	D.   Clincher or Personal remark
When does it happen?          What do they say/do?	Have one, final sentence taht ends the story with a bang.
Where do they go?
B.     The problem
What do they do?          What does te main character do?
What do the other people say?          and react?

On Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar

Exposure/ Not mastery

The goal of Vocabulary and Grammar exercises is not to require your students to memorize the grammatical terms of noun, verb, adjective; similes and metaphors, word-formation, etc. Rather, it is to expose them to the vocabulary and langauge structures and invite them to play with tehse kinds of words and sentence patterns. The grammar of English languge will come with time. Till then, let them simply enjoy the concepts only.

4 – Point Check

When writing sentences, especially in the lower classes, your student should practise the 4 – Point Check.

1.     Capitals: Dd I remember to use a capital at the beginning of the sentence?

2.     Spacing: Is there a finger space between words?

3.     Punctuations: Did I remember the end mark?

4.     Sense/Meaning: Does it make sense?

To answer the last question, have her/him read his sentence out aloud to ensure that she/he did not leave out any words or mix them up in any way.

This check is an important skill for your student to remember: He should always check his own work before handing it to his teacher to ensure the rule "The student is the checker. The teacher is the marker."

Individualization

·         Adjust the sample answers outlined in the Teachers Manual to suite your students.

·         Feel free to substitute other answers as desired. You may use the ones from your Teachers Manual, or students may compose their oun sentences or answers.

·         Encourage you student to focus on imagination and creativity.

·         There are, of course, many possible ways of incorporating student's and your own ideas into the sample answers given in the Manual.

·         Write several sentences using the same word  in a variety of structures. This will help your student develop a feeling 'there can be as many structure or sentences they want to make'.

·         Learning to write fluently means knowing how to vary your sentence structures so that they don’t become boring and repetitive.

Think about the way you learned to write. Your first sentences probably followed the typical pattern in the English language. Subject (noun) predicate (verb) and possibly object (noun): Jack hit the ball.

-       Then you might have added a descriptive adverb.	-       Jack hit the ball forcefully
-       Later you might have learned to put the adverb first.	-       Forcefully, Jack hit the ball
-       Later still, you might have learned to give more specific details, perhaps adding a verbal metaphor like sailed.	-       Jack hit the ball so forcefully that it sailed over the left field fence.
-       Or you added a participle to make the action more vivid.	-       Jack hit the ball forcefully, driving it over the left field fence.
-       Perhaps you learned to change the focus, shifting attention to the ball by using the passive voice.	-       The ball, hit forcefully by Jack, sailed high over the left field fence.
-       Or perhaps you shifted the attention to the reaction of the crowd.	-       The fans watched, awestruck, as Jack pounded the ball high over the left field fence.

Teaching varied genres:

Teachers are encouraged to make choices from the many options available and to select activities that they think will suit the levels and interests within their classes.

Biography: Either provide students with biographical information about the prescribed personality or ask them to research their backgrounds briefly.

Plays: Arrange a dramatised reading of the prescribed play/drama. (You could ask students to prepare this, choose a version from an audio cassette or read the poem to students yourself.)

Ask the students to answer the questions about the way language is used in the poem to construct the characters of Aunt Polly (the woman with the cane) and Cinderella's stepmother. Discuss the findings as a class.

It is important that students are not discouraged or assessed on their lack of artistic ability.

No element of this Teaching Guide may be reproduced for sale or uploaded to a publicly accessible website or included in another print or electronic publication without prior written permission from Shubharambha Publication.

Contents

                                                                                                                                            

PAGE NO.

Book I                                                                                                               1-10

Book II                                                                                                            11-22

Book III                                                                                                           23-36

Book IV                                                                                                           37-52

Book V                                                                                                            53-68

Book VI                                                                                                           69-82

Book VII                                                                                                        83-102

Book VIII                                                                                                     103-131

Model Questions                                                                                       132-149

Teacher's Remarks Page                                                                                 150