Using Storyboards

I've been trying to encourage my learners to read books in English at home, with their children if possible. This is a daunting task for my learners with low literacy skills. For this reason I have introduced the use of storyboards and I'm amazed by their effectiveness merely as a tool of communication.

With my E1a group yesterday we looked at a story called "My Son is Sick". It's a very simple story yet I was aware that some of my learners still would not be able to read it. We read it through a couple of times - once with me reading it and then once with established reading it aloud in turns. I then took the books away and paired learners into mixed ability pairs. I gave them storyboards with a selection of 9 pictures from the book. It was excellent seeing them using the pictures to re-tell the stories to each other. I avoided correcting too much for accuracy and simply let them describe the pictures to start with. We then built upon this and it worked really well.

I'm using a similar idea tomorrow with my Family Learning group to consider reading with children in preparation for our library visit next week. We are using pictures from "The Gruffalo" which I think will be interesting.

I will be presenting this method at the non-ILT resources training session in a few weeks time and hope to get some good feedback from my colleagues.