By Venessa Deosaran
Since May 2005, more than four libraries have been built in Yupukari, Rupununi. At present, even more are being created in surrounding villages with the aim of encouraging reading and making it fun.
The nursery school library is a large, one-room cinderblock schoolhouse that accommodates forty children and two teachers.
In May 2005, it was empty, except for tables and chairs. After about a month of three-way discussions between the Rupununi Learners Foundation (RLF) and schoolteachers, inspired by the influx of new materials, RLF began to carve eight learning centres out of the vast space.
A playhouse, furnished with a doll family, their hammocks, pets and miniature household tools, a dress-up centre, a place for water play, an art space, a math centre, science centre, store and a traditional “classroom-facing-a- blackboard” space were all created.
Fortunately, the school has a pair of storerooms, one of which became the ‘story room’. One mayu (community service) day, a group of village women scrubbed the space from top to bottom, and artist Combrencent Ernest painted the floor and walls in preparation for his mural, “The Story of Yupukari.” About 5,500 books, new and used, donated and purchased, were brought to Yupukari from the U. S. in May 2005.
It quickly became apparent that the books posed a significant challenge to the teachers, and that training with books and teaching reading were going to be needed. There is nothing new or exciting about this training, in fact it is a very pared-down version of very ordinary language arts activity.
But in these village schools, a broad selection of storybooks, unlined paper, and crayons numerous enough to occupy a whole classroom simultaneously, are stimulating for students and teachers.
The essence of the programme is building motivation to read by means of enjoyable story and art experiences that entail hearing, speaking, writing and reading of English on a daily basis. As suggested by a library survey, entertainment is a strongly felt need in the village.
And the challenge of learning to read in a foreign language, in which you are not immersed, is sufficiently daunting that motivation and ongoing support must be strong indeed for learning to occur.
Taking technology into the village library
The most successful multimedia curriculum has been the pairing of storybooks with matching video, generally Scholastic titles with matching Children’s Circle videos/ DVDs. The teachers reported that the stories children saw on film were the ones they most sought to read, and generated the most motivated bookmaking experiences. With more funds, RLF would focus on a core classroom collection of multiple paperback copies (enough for the whole class) of certain stories and matching DVDs.
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