PILSOW Strategy in Teaching Kindergarten Pupils

ABSTRACT

Title :              PILSOW Strategy in Teaching Kindergarten Pupils

Researcher : Herson B. Bello

Degree :        Master of Arts in Teaching Early Grades                        

School :        University of Caloocan City

Year :             March, 2017

The study focuses on introducing the Picture, Learning, Sounds, and Writing or PILSOW teaching strategy to develop the reading and writing skills of kindergarten pupils in public schools, specifically in Camarin Elementary School, Camarin D Elementary school, and Caloocan North Elementary School in Caloocan City. PILSOW is devised by the researcher in his own classroom in November, where pupils were having difficulty recognizing letters and numbers through their sounds. After just a month of making use of pictures, innovative learning materials, sounds, and writing, class participation soared and the pupils were able to ace through their lessons with little to no distraction or aggression.

This aims to be beneficial to kindergarten pupils and teachers who are the main subjects. School administrators and the Department of Education could also get from here a learning innovation that they could possibly implement on a wider scale. Parents of kindergarten pupils could also benefit from this study as they will get to know better how basic learning works. This study will also be advantageous to future related research work on pre-school / kindergarten education.

The study is delimited to 37 kindergarten teachers and 185 kindergarten pupils, selected at random, from Camarin Elementary School, Camarin D Elementary school, and Caloocan North Elementary School in Caloocan City.

To be able to better understand and gauge whether PILSOW will really work in public school classroom settings or not, the researcher used experimentation, evaluation research, and descriptive research. The researcher asked the sample kindergarten teachers to implement the PILSOW instruction in their classrooms for at least a whole grading period or about two months. After implementation, the teachers are interviewed regarding their evaluation of PILSOW and their descriptive analysis on its use for kindergarten pupils.

Based on the data gathered after experimenting with PILSOW in other actual classroom settings, it was found out that all of the pupil-respondents were able to read and write after PILSOW instruction. There were just a few who needed a little more help in rhymes and identifying final sounds. The foremost problems encountered are some teachers' regional accent and the intellectual quotient (IQ) of the pupils. Some teachers noted the labor intensive materials, but quipped that these are manageable.

Therefore, the study recommends the continuous use of PILSOW as a mode of instruction for kindergarten pupils and introduce it to schools that have not used this strategy yet. Further evaluation and research is also recommended to improve the module for PILSOW that will hopefully result in enhanced test scores. Kindergarten teachers are also encouraged to undergo more trainings in oral discourse, and schools are encouraged to help them by allotting resources for PILSOW instruction. Although unified instructional materials are a practical move, the researcher highly recommends that the instruction be more attuned to what the children who are actually enrolled really need and want to learn. Thus, the need to develop a skills assessment system prior to instruction.