Our readers are ready!

We have a few fingers in different pies and various projects we are working on at the moment – all related in an intricate web to help improve teaching and children’s reading here. One of our most exciting projects – producing some early readers for children – has come to a reality! We have created some early reading books, based on our phonics programme that we teach. Currently, no such books exist in Uganda and any that you can find are expensive western books with smiley white kids on the seaside – not what we are after.

This project began a couple of years ago, and we have been blessed to have quite a few volunteers along the way to help us write and edit the short readers. We recently partnered with another organisation and a local graphic designer to illustrate the readers and now the first set is taking up all table-top space in our house. There are three sets in total, and they follow a systematic approach to teaching reading – fantastic for Uganda when resources are few and there’s no big library or resource room of magic tricks. The readers are designed for children to read independently, hopefully they will be able to put their skills into practice and read alone. How motivating would that be!

It’s the beginning of the new term here now and we look forward to getting these readers into schools and running trainings on how to use them.