The course and training programme Phonics.cz has been created by Katerina Gacek after numerous years of teaching English to primary school aged children in both Great Britain and the Czech Republic.
Katerina graduated from the Faculty of Education at University Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. On completion of her studies in the Czech Republic, she took the opportunity to continue with her postgraduate education in London. Upon her graduation in the UK and gaining the Qualified Teacher Status Katerina set out on her professional career there and taught at the leading independent preparatory schools in London for more than 8 years. Back in Prague, she joined the Central Point International Elementary School (as both the primary school teacher and the curriculum coordinator) where she gained experience with teaching non-native speakers of English as well.
Katerina has always found teaching young children both fulfilling and rewarding therefore decided to carry on with her mission after becoming a second time mum and began focusing mainly on phonics as a method for teaching reading and writing the English language. She has continued to research, create visual resources and practical guidelines for developing learners' phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes. Katerina’s goal is to make sure her students understand the correspondence between the sounds - phonemes - and the spelling patterns - graphemes - that represent them.
At present, Katerina teaches English to children who are bilingual or native speakers as well as runs EFL (English as a Foreign Language) courses for non-native language speaking children in Prague. She’s recently introduced the phonics based teacher training courses as well as parent training seminars in order to share her experience and help teachers of English implement the methodology in their language classes and parents become familiar with the concept of phonics to assist their children in learning the English language.