A new after-school program was started several weeks ago to supplement the formal education of school-aged children living in the village. The purpose of the program is to improve the confidence, self-esteem and performance of the children at school.
The hope is to accomplish this by providing individual and small-group tutoring assistance as well as educational games and activities that will make learning a fun and rewarding experience for the children. The program is incentive and rewards based, using positive reinforcement for participation and effort.
As many as 40 children ranging in age from 3 to 15 years attend the program on a daily basis, all meeting in one room with three or four adults to supervise. We are anxiously awaiting the completion of a new learning center building consisting of three separate rooms which will lower the noise level a bit and allow us to separate the children by age and provide age-appropriate resources and activities.
It has been a real pleasure to spend time with the children reading and writing, putting together puzzles and playing checkers and Scrabble, which are favorites of the older children. The children value the opportunity to receive an education greatly and it is not unusual for children to be waiting for the program to begin and request their favorite activity… ‘We want to read’… ‘We want Scrabble’… ‘We want checkers’… ‘We want puzzles’. The boys in particular swarm the checker boards, which teach critical thinking and Scrabble has proven to be an excellent tool to build vocabulary and sharpen spelling and math skills. Yesterday the boys got a real kick out of playing chess for the first time and all the different intricacies and complexities of chess compared to checkers.
The learning center currently has one Scrabble board and two checker boards but the children are collecting plastic bottle caps (Coca-Cola caps are red, Pepsi are blue) to make their own checker sets. Plans for double-elimination checkers and Scrabble tournaments are being made as well as a good old-fashioned spelling bee.