Literacy for Malawi

Your support is helping our project to grow!

We’ve had an exciting first term at Tsokamkanansi Primary School, where we’ve been expanding our project by reaching more children. Management at the school have been so impressed with the impacts of our programme that they have asked us to extend it to all classes at the school! With over 1,000 children, that’s a big ask. But our Senior Education Officer, Andrew, has risen to the challenge. He now reaches all pupils at the school through the daily assembly. 

We’re also thrilled to be growing our project with the addition of our third Literacy Specialist Teacher, Constance. She has taken over teaching of Year 1 (Standard 1), while Thandi is teaching Year 2 and Florence is teaching Year 3. As well as supporting more children to learn English, your support is helping our amazing teachers to continue their personal development. 

This is a great development, as more children are on their first step to learning literacy and numeracy. But children learn more in smaller groups, with a dedicated teacher to help them. And to reach more children like this, we need your support to hire another teacher. By giving a £10 monthly donation through GlobalGiving, you can help reach more children in the classroom. Will you please set up a £10 monthly donation today?

Children are more engaged, and more likely to attend school

Andrew has created some exciting resources out of locally available low-cost materials, like the ‘CharChar Baby’ (a dancing puppet), which he uses to teach phonics (letter sounds) to the whole school during a 15 minute assembly. Everyone thoroughly enjoys these sessions, including staff! Children rush to school to make sure that they don’t miss these interactive entertaining and educational sessions! It is a joy and a privilege to watch Andrew and the staff and children marching, singing and dancing with huge smiles as they learn new concepts such as short and long vowel sounds.

Anecdotally teachers report that children have become more engaged with school life and that the absentee levels have reduced in the CharChar intervention classes.

In early December CharChar Literacy Specialist Teachers benefited from a week-long CPD course in evidence-based literacy teaching practices and methodologies. The teachers enthusiastically embraced the new ideas and were soon putting them into practice! (see attached photos).

Exploring new partnerships to improve teacher training 

Meanwhile in the background CharChar have been developing a partnership with Sussex University to support our work with Emmanuel University in Lilongwe. In November we were visited by Jo Tregenza, (Reader in Primary Education, Vice President of United Kingdom Literacy Association, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Teaching Association, Founding Fellow of the Chartered College of Teachers, NPQH, MA, Director of Student Experience). Together we’re exploring new opportunities for our partnership and investigating Higher Education Institution teaching in Malawi. Jo also observed many lessons at local government primary schools and at CharChar supported Tsokamkanansi demonstration school in order to evaluate CharChar methodologies and practices in early grade (infant) literacy instruction.

Jo recommended some of the CharChar teaching practices be incorporated into the Teacher Education programme at Emmanuel University. We immediately set to work designing units to support the university to develop and integrate foundational literacy education (language and numeracy) in the EmUni Diploma Course. These new units will be rolled out at the end of January 2023 and will be linked to our work at the Demonstration school. Our aim is to reach all 20 teaching practice schools which are used by EmUni as host schools for their students to complete their teaching practice experience.Our next step now is to support these teaching practices in all twenty teaching practice schools used by EmUni as host schools for student-teachers to complete their teaching practice experience.

At the end of the term we conducted an assessment of the intervention classes and took a sample from Standard 4 who have not received any intervention other than the recently introduced assembly sessions. We look forward to sharing results with you in the next report.