During May & June we financed the “Read Write Now” Program, planned and fascilitated by Danijah Taylor a.k.a. Writtinggod, a creative writing curriculum for early childhood institutions, that fosters a love for reading and writing from an early age with the use of creative teaching methods such as puppets, animated videos and worksheets.
GOAL AND OBJECTIVES
The worldwide pandemic caused the school system in Jamaica to be closed for most of the past two years. Most affected where the 5-year-olds early childhood, from the lack of internet making it impossible for online learning but also their short attention-span made online learning difficult. The two years away from the classrooms has further caused a drop in the nations already below average reading levels.
‘Read Write Now’ provided a four week (Monday to Friday) one-hour per-day creative writing curriculum to The Nation Baptist Basic School in Trench Town, Kingston (age group 4/5 year-olds). With the use of creative teaching methods to edutain the students, using animated reading-videos and hand puppets.
• Improve the young students reading and writing ability and foster a love for reading and writing through creativity while introducing them back into the classroom learning experience.
• Train teachers on the use of creative writing techniques in the classroom for further use after the 4-weeks program.
• Daily worksheets for the students to judge the impact of the curriculum and the literacy levels of the students.
• Provide a positive experience for the young studends, teachers and daily volunteers.
The support of daily volunteers to the program was needed and helpful with the lively attendance of an average of 60 children per day!
The program was a great success and we agreed to continue and finance an next ‘Read Write Now’ Session at another inner-city school before the year done. So watch out for more to come…
RECOMMENDATIONS by DANIJAH TAYLOR
“Blessings to ‘HELP Jamaica’ for sponsoring this programme for the Jamaican youth.
The programme was extremely needed it helped both the students and teachers. Students got the information needed to improve both reading and writing while the teachers got the much-needed break from the usual classrooms setting.
The pandemic had caused a major shift in learning for the 5-year-olds, they came back to the classrooms with even more learning difficulties and shorter attention spans causing the teachers work to be more difficult. Read Write Now was a life saver with the creative teaching methods.”
