KEEP continues its reading promotion campaign and last weekend, British Ambassador to Liberia, Ambassador David Belgrove volunteered several hours of his time to read to the kids at the New Life reading room.
The importance of promoting reading among young learners cannot be over emphasized as has been clearly seen in the recently released West Africa Examinations Council (WAEC) exams results which showed that only 38.48% of students who sat the exams successfully passed.
This result has been labelled as the worst WEAC results in four years.
This reinforces that the work we do at KEEP needs to be continued and spread to other parts of Liberia as the stark reality is that many of our students lack basic reading comprehension.
Reading comprehension is the bedrock of learning and many Liberian students somewhat sail through grade levels without full reading comprehension skills, so it is no wonder that they sadly flunk the WAEC exams as many do not fully understand the questions being asked either in the reading, literature or English exams.
Most schools do not offer Reading as a stand-alone subject nor actually help students develop good reading skills or habits. So we at KEEP will continue the campaign of promoting a reading culture among young learners and encourage parents to make time to read to and with their children, to be more involved in the education of their children beyond the paying of tuition and take a more active role in supporting the teachers who are imparting knowledge to their children.
KEEP extends thanks and appreciation to British Ambassador to Liberia, Ambassador David Belgrove for volunteering several hours of his time to read to over 20 young school children recently at KEEP’s reading room. Ambassador Belgrove noted that “reading, an essential skill, is vital for children’s development; it opens so many doors and opportunities to enrich lives.”
Ambassador Belgrove was quite the animated reader and the children enjoyed the reading session with him and learned several new words at the end of the reading hour.
One of the books he read was the all-time children’s classic “The Three Little Pigs”. Ambassador Belgrove said that it was a pleasure to visit KEEP’s reading room and the children and teachers were a delight to witness and hopes more children are encouraged to read as it forms the bedrock of the education.
We did some crossword puzzles with the older students and this exercise not only taught the kids how to do word puzzles, but they also learned a few new words, the pronunciation of the words and the meaning and usage of the words.
We loved having you with us Ambassador and hope you come back again soon. There are still a few books patiently waiting for you to read to the kids.
