Teaching Assistant Strategies

5 strategies that a teaching assistant might use to support literacy development:

1.Improving language which means building children’s vocabulary. Vocabulary is very important. It is needed to communicate, to understand others and to express own ideas. Building and improving vocabulary will improve reading and writing skills. In order to improve children’s vocabulary teaching assistant could make sure to provide children with a language-rich environment. Language-rich environments include the home, school and the places children visit. Teaching assistant could set up and maintain the classroom environment; support the parents and carers with the advice and resources for using at home; and the teaching assistant could assist the children on

Explaining and clarifying is a very important strategy, especially for children who struggle to understand. Teaching assistant can teach the students to clarify by focusing their attention on reasons why the text is difficult; to understand and to notice when they don’t understand; to clarify parts of the text which have confused them; to monitor their comprehension as they read, and to correct it when needed.

Students should notice when they don’t understand the text; they can’t read a word, or don’t understand a word; they can’t figure out how the text is set up. Teaching assistant can teach students to use fix-up strategies to fix the problem when they don’t understand the text; to think about what they know; to stop and think about what they have already read; to reread. Teaching assistant can explain what to do if children can’t read a word, or don’t understand a word: They should teach them to break words down, look for little words inside big words, look for base or root words, prefixes, or suffixes etc; to keep reading or rereading to see if they can get a sense of the definition from the text. Explaining and clarifying should lead to better understanding and gaining confidence in order to better literacy

All children need instruction; modelling, explaining, and demonstrating are very important teaching activities if children are to learn to read and write. Teaching assistant can model the reading and writing by engaging in them while children observe; reading aloud to children, which provides a model of how reading sounds and how stories go. Reading aloud is a way to model fluent reading. Teaching assistant can discuss books and stories while modelling the thinking process leading to understanding. Teaching assistant talks through the process step-by-step to show the children how things are done, for example, how to make, confirm or change predictions. Teaching assistant can model re-reading of the text if the meaning is unclear and can model working out a difficult word. Writing can be modelled by using the whiteboard. Teaching assistant can model how to use strategies to help reading and writing. Through the modelling process the children should get confident enough to talk, think, share and reflect; they should want to be let free to do their