"Mmmm" a very good place to start!
សួស្តី Sousdey Hello!
I hope everyone who receives this email is enjoying the gifts of summer! As many of you know I’m heading to Cambodia in the next few weeks with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s Young Adult and Global Missions Program. I’m reaching out because I just got my placement at the Lutheran Church of Cambodia’s Krous Church and Life Centre.
I'm going to be commissioned by Salt House Church in Kirkland on August 18th. I feel so grateful for the prayers and loving send-off.
Krous Church and Life Centre is situated in Phum Krous in rural central Cambodia. The Centre has a pre-school as well as English and IT classes, medical missions, and livelihood projects such as chicken and mushroom farming, and is a site for the Lutheran World Federations World Hunger Initiative. The Church holds services for adults, youth, and children.
Phum Krous is a 25-minute taxi from Kampong Chhnang a beautiful large town known for being off the international tourist circuit. Kampong Chhnang is also home to some to of Cambodia's floating villages.
I’ve been getting butterflies searching through Google Maps to get a feel for the area I’ll be living in. I’ll be tucked away from city bustle and I’m excited for the peace and focus in Christ I hope rural life will bring to my work at the Church and Centre.
Kilara has been supportive of my move and plans to visit. He’s excited to try the street food!!
I am deeply grateful to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America for covering the cost of 2/3 of the expenses of my teaching if you're interested in checking out my KATIE ELCA YAGM BIO you can help me and the church cover the remaining expenses of making this mission work possible.
I don't know yet exactly what the Centre has planned for my participation, but I’ve been preparing with idea that I might be teaching Pre-School and English. In addition to a number of very long dresses I’ve acquired a giant elephant puppet to help teach the sounds that support a person to read in the English language. Khmer, the language of Cambodia, has the largest alphabet in the world with 74 characters. I’m excited to see how my students relate to the 26 letters and 44 sounds in the English language. I’m interested the specific reasons my students want to learn English, what they want to do with the investment in the language.
I want to be very clear that while I am really enjoying preparing for how I imagine I'll be teaching at Krous Life Centre, I am 110% open to them asking me to do something different or telling me why my approach isn't what they want. Literacy is always contextual so any prep prior to making relationships with people should be taken with a boat load of salt. I also don't speak Khmer yet and will need to revisit the accuracy of the language in this blog.
A major part of the foundation of teaching reading is teaching the sounds in English, how they are symbolized, and how to blend or segment those sounds into reading words.
So, one way I've started to prep for lessons is by looking through the Khmer-English dictionary for words that start with the same sound in both languages. This way when I teach how a sound is symbolized in English I can do my best to draw on the students existing knowledge of that sound in Khmer and the meaning that sound can be connected to in their everyday life. This process is described as Cross-Linguistic Transfer. There is a significant amount of research that shows awareness of sounds in one's home language strengthens an ability to learn sounds (a foundation of reading) in another.
For example, the first sound I teach in English is "Mm" because learning sounds in order allows us to build a base of sounds to practice reading words in a progressive order. For teaching the sound "Mm" with kiddos who are just starting to learn to read English who speak Khmer I am not only focused on developing a connection with the sound "mmmm" and the written symbol "m" but also the meaning students make with the sound "mmmmm" in their language and their lives.
My gems of words to teach the sound "m" are:
mouth (មាត់ - mat), motorcycle (ម៉ូតូ - moto), marker (ម៉ាក្រ - mak), machine (ម៉ាស៊ីន -masin), and mask (ម៉ាស్కារ - maskar)
We know that images are more quickly stored in long term memory and support meaning making and attention. These images are from AI but I would love to work with an artist in Cambodia to create images.
The order I teach the sounds in English is:
m, a, s, d, t, i, n, p, g, o, c, k, ck, u, b, f, e, l, h, sh, r, j, v, y, w, th, z, ch, qu, x, ng
ff, ll le, mm, tt, nn kn, gg, rr, ss ce c, zz s, bb dd pp, tch (ch), wh (w), ay, ee, igh, ow, oo, ar, or, air, ou, ir, oy, s, ve, kn (n), le (l), ce c (s)
y (ee), ie (igh), oe (ow), ue (oo), i-e (igh), o-e (ow), u-e (oo), a-e (ay), e-e (ee), ai (ay), ea (ee), oa (ow), ew (oo), oi (oy), ire, ear/eer, er (ir), aw (or), ow (ou), ure, are (air), ur (ir), ea (e), se (s), g (j), ge/dge (j), e (ee), i (igh), o (ow), a (ay), u (oo/you), wr (r), ore/oor (or), au (or), tien, clous, ph (f)
This order of sounds is from "The Fun of Phonics" by my former boss in Gulu, Uganda, the brilliant teacher Jody Unterrheiner founder of READ for Life Uganda.
The principles of literacy are phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. We'll probably dive deeper into those elements later in this blog.
But the truth is I don't know how to teach reading until the community shows me how. I'm so excited to be in that conversation. What words and topics do my students love?! What direction are they trying to go? What can be spoken that makes us laugh. How is reading taught in Khmer? How can knowing that better teach me how to teach reading in English? I'm so grateful to get to ask these questions. I have no idea what the answers will be.
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