Success by numbers…

Over the holiday period some of the READ for Life staff and volunteers in Uganda (and abroad) have been busy collating results from our big end of year Early Grade Reading Assessment. We haven’t finished crunching all the numbers, but there’s some really encouraging results so far!
Currently in northern Uganda, children read an average of 3 words per minute in English by the end of P3 (around third grade level). In Australia, the US and UK, children read an average of more than 100 words per minute by the end of third grade. I think the numbers speak for themselves and you can clearly see that children in northern Uganda (and the rest of the country) need a lot more support with their reading to become literate and independent readers!

We did a rough average of the schools we have worked with in Gulu (and the results which we have collated so far), and our current average for P3 children in Gulu is 50 words per minute (42 wpm for government schools and 57 wpm for private schools). This is so encouraging! Over the next few weeks of holidays, along with doing a lot of teacher training, we will complete collating all these results and use them to inform our programme and planning for the year.

Thank you for being a part of this journey!