CALAMBA CITY, Laguna (PIA) -- The Department of Education (DepEd) recently launched Catch-Up Fridays to provide opportunities for learners to improve their academic performance, particularly in reading.

Teachers in Laguna share how the program benefits their overall teaching strategies.

Chinky Ruth Marilag, a Grade 4 teacher at Lopez Elementary School in Los Baños, admitted that the implementation of Catch-Up Fridays initially came as a challenge, not only for teachers but for learners as well.

“In Catch-Up Fridays we need to provide reading materials to our pupils in a more appetizing and exciting way, and at the same time sustain their attention and interest for reading from morning until the rest of the school hours,” Marilag said.

Instead of treating the program as another workload of having the need to rearrange their lesson plans, come up with more engaging activities, and set their learning goals for the week, Teacher Chinky now finds the program as a better alternative to help students improve their reading ability without holding additional remedial classes beyond school hours.  

The teacher said: “For us who have students classified as frustration readers, this is a positive way to focus our efforts to them and properly guide them on how we can improve their reading skills. Instead of extending for one to two hours for remedial classes, we can do it for a whole day during Fridays.”

According to DepEd IV-A Education Program Supervisor Diane Catherine Teves, morning lessons will focus on the National Reading Program, while the other half will be spent on Values, Health, and Peace education, with themes varying each month.

Marilag said that during the first two Fridays of implementation, their school allotted the first part of the day for DEAR or ‘Drop Everything and Read’ to ask students to do role playing to enhance their creativity and imagination.

The teachers observed that there is a need to group the pupils according to their reading ability, classified into three groups – independent readers, instructional readers and frustration readers, to effectively execute their prepared programs.

DepEd IV-A supports the initiative by the teachers to use their own unique approach, based off their classroom observations.

“Teachers also have the freedom to use an integrative approach in their teaching, where the content of their learning area serves as a springboard to develop the students’ reading skills. This is because the focus of Catch-Up Fridays is really on enhancing the reading skills of students,” Teves said.

The reading program, based on the student’s skills, will also provide an inclusive learning environment for those with difficulty in reading. 

Viernalyn Nama, Curriculum and Learning Management Division chief of DepEd IV-A, stated that the education department is committed to implement necessary technical assistance needed by the schools in implementing the program. 

“We also conduct monitoring and feedback [mechanism] with the implementers from the field which we use as the basis for the technical assistance to provide,” 

Nama added: “We also conduct regular reading assessments which can be used by the schools to determine that there is a need to help our learners ‘catch up’ on their reading skills.” (Patricia Bermudez, Cecilia Maloles/PIA-4A)