Avid Readers

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It’s just before 2 pm and a crowd of excited school children have gathered around the doors of GHEI’s library.  They chatter and laugh, some kicking around a soccer ball, others playing jacks with pebbles.  All of these children have finished their school day, but are here eagerly awaiting the start of the daily ‘Read-a-thon’.  The Read-a-thon is GHEI’s month long program which encourages the kids to do some extra reading through two separate two-hour reading periods each day at the library.  The aim of the Read-a-thon is to improve reading skills and to foster an interest and joy in reading amongst these young students.

It’s remarkable how eager they are to hit the books.  When the library doors finally open the kids try to rush through all at once, getting caught with little shoulders wedged against the door frame.  Nevertheless, GHEI Library Administrator Lawrence Donkor runs a tight ship and keeps things orderly, insisting that everyone signs in while entering.

I’ve had the chance to help out around the Read-a-thon by monitoring the kids and it’s been a really enjoyable process.  It’s satisfying when a student approaches me to ask the pronunciation of a word. “Con-clu-sion” I say.  She rushes back to her friends to teach them the correct pronunciation with pride. It’s also good to see a young boy totally absorbed in his "Clifford the Dog" book, and funny to think that a story about a massive red dog is as entertaining to Ghanaian kids today as it was to my Canadian classmates and I twenty years ago. 

That being said, the North American context of many of these children’s books has proven to be an obstacle when trying to improve literacy.  They often include concepts that the kids have no prior knowledge of, which can be detrimental to reading comprehension. GHEI addresses this challenge with an intake of stories written by African authors featuring a more familiar context for our young readers.

Two hours is a long time for some of the younger participants to concentrate and things can get a little hectic in the closing minutes.  I’ve defused a few small quarrels, and even had to break up some fisticuffs that broke out over a coveted piece of reading material.  I confiscated the book in question and not wanting to compromise my disciplinarian façade, contained my laughter in seeing that it was a picture book of WWF wrestlers.  Go figure!  Fortunately, for the most part everyone is well behaved and focused on their reading.

To motivate the kids, Read-a-thon is something of a contest.  Each junior high school student is awarded a point for every thirty minutes spent reading in the library, while younger students are given a point for every twenty minutes of reading.  At the end of the month we will tally up the points and award prizes to the students with leading scores in the different age groups. 

 In addition to this GHEI will hold a quiz competition that will see Humjibre’s various schools competing against each other in the categories of lower primary, upper primary and junior high school.  Each school has been given books to study based on reading level, and contestants will be quizzed on their reading comprehension as well as their general knowledge of Humjibre and Ghana.

Next week GHEI will welcome our second group of Summer Serve and Learn Volunteers who will help out throughout the rest of the Read-a-thon by reading to the children for story time, assist in creating the quiz competition as well as assess the students final performance.  We look forward to their arrival!

Ready to read!

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