Featured Teacher
Linda Golding opens the world of
literacy and learning to students
Mrs. Linda Golding, Grade 1
Team Leader at VISS.
M
ost educators will admit
that their love for teaching
started with an affinity for
children. While some yielded
to the call of this great vocation early,
others tend to find their way after
dabbling in other industries. The latter
was the case for Mrs. Linda Golding,
Grade 1 Team Leader at the Victoria
International School of Sharjah (VISS).
Linda works closely with Mrs Kerry
Graham, Head of Primary and the Early
Learning Center in creating a number
of innovative literacy programmes at
VISS.
Linda was born in Wales but spent
most of her life in Australia. After a
few years working as the secretary to a
solicitor, she embarked on her dream
of becoming an educator and has
been teaching for the past 35 years.
28 | Mar - Apr 2016 |
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Below she shares with us some of the
dynamic programmes that are in place
within her school that promote literacy
among the students.
Share two programmes
geared at improving literacy at
VISS.
Readers Workshop: The English PLT
collated as much information as they
could about different types of reading
programmes. After much reading,
discussion, observation and the
analyzing of data from this information,
they developed a programme that
was suitable for our students from
Foundation to Year 5. We wanted a
programme that was appropriate, easy
and consistently conducted across the
breadth of the Primary School.
Class Time
2-hour literacy block in Foundation to
Grade 2: This is not a programme, per
se but it has certainly helped teachers
to focus on literacy in a meaningful
way. We have an hour reading and an
hour writing session daily – explicit
teaching of skills happens during this
time.
Spelling Programme: Last year,
we implemented our own Spelling
programme that the English PLT
created, using a variety of different
programmes that they had reviewed
over the previous 12 months. After
assessment and analyzing the collated
data, the VISS spelling programme
was created, which supports the
literacy needs of our students. This
programme scaffolds the learning from
Foundation to Grade 5 incorporating
and extending the knowledge our