Material development
Without the proper materials, teaching early literacy skills is extremely challenging, but in developing countries that is the case more often than not. We work to identify holes in the government curriculum and then create materials to supplement the standard textbook. This may include letter cards for phonics practice, word cards to help with print recognition, pre-writing exercises to develop motor skills and workbooks to guide remediation exercises.
We share our materials and best practices with the governments we work with as well as other NGOs. Our hope is to improve reading instruction in a way that can be incorporated into the government curriculum and scaled to entire regions of the world -offering the potential to lift millions out of poverty.
Targeting environmental factors
At the government level, we advocate for more instruction time in public schools devoted to the acquisition of literacy skills and more training for teachers. Our local team combines cutting-edge research from around the globe with their knowledge of the unique challenges facing each individual community to devise a customized Reading & Writing Instruction program that suits the local context.
We also reach out directly to the communities we work in through events and workshops, to be sure that they understand the value of building children’s literacy skills. Support from parents to practice reading at home can greatly affect a child’s acquisition of reading and writing skills, so we encourage each of our local teams to conduct community awareness in the way they think will be most effective.