Education Dominican Republic Project #16679

Literacy for Dominican-Haitian Youth in the Batey

by Yspaniola Incorporated

Literacy for Dominican-Haitian Youth in the Batey

Project Report | Mar 26, 2024
Discover words with Jenga

By Alejandra Garcia | Project Leader

Our literacy program constantly explores new teaching strategies and games to inspire children to continue progressing in reading fluency. While we utilize the books available in our learning center library, we also seek innovative methods beyond traditional approaches. This comes after ensuring students have mastered all the phonemes of the method.

Acquiring new vocabulary is an essential aspect of fluency development. When done through games, we enhance their vocabulary and stimulate brain development and imagination.

Jenga is among the favorite games of children aged 8 to 12 in Batey Libertad. This game involves stacking wooden pieces to form a tower, with each player taking turns removing a piece and placing it on top without causing the tower to collapse. Engaging in this game aids in developing skills such as concentration and fine motor skills.

The strategy devised by Yspaniola teachers involves adding words to the wooden pieces. Thus, the challenge doubles as players must not only remove a piece without causing the tower to fall but also read the word on it. Our children exude enthusiasm and enjoy playing "word Jenga."

Following the game, teachers gather the children in the classroom to review the new words they've encountered. These words are written down and illustrated, reinforcing their meaning.

Witnessing our students' progress brings us immense joy, but above all, we are driven by their joyful and motivated learning experiences. We extend our gratitude for your support in making this possible.

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Nov 29, 2023
Yspaniola returns to public school!

By Alejandra Garcia | Interim Executive Director

First, pay attention to the instructions

Before the pandemic, on top of teaching the children of Batey Libertad, Yspaniola offered reading and writing classes to students of said community that needed it most. Many of these children lived in zones close to the batey, meaning they hugely benefited from this program.

From March 2020, that incentive ended, and as you know, as a consequence there were general delays on a large scale for the children who could not go to school and could not depend on the possibility of learning online.

After three years, we are very happy to share with you that we have returned to the school! So finally we have been able to return and offer this necessary program to the children so that they can learn to read and write.

Currently, we are teaching 27 children in this program, while another 50 attend the program in the preschool and 29 in the Learning Center, thus a total of 106 in comparison to the 66 of the last academic year.

We started at the end of September with lots of enthusiasm and the children as well have been very happy learning. We work hand in hand with the director and teachers so that we can collectively detect the cases of the children that present the most difficulties. We then tested the children's phonetics and reading proficiencies, with the purpose of distinguishing groups depending on their capabilities to reach their potentials.

Similar to previous years, we base our teaching on the phonetics method and one of their favorite games to play is the ‘robbing of letters’.

The game consists of 4 steps:

Placing the phonetic cards face up on the table
Choose 1 or 2 participants
The teacher says a letter and the student must pick the correct letter
The student that picks the correct letter, wins

Seeing all the children motivated for their studies encourages us to continue our work day to day.

Thank you for all the donations and for people like you that have made this possible!

Learning phonetics

Daris, Edenay, Yerlina, Gleysi, Kas and Roxan

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Aug 1, 2023
Applying the Montessori Method

By Alejandra Garcia | Interim Executive Director

Visit

This spring, Yspaniola won the first Montessori award from The Dream Project and Cigar Country. This award consists of the provision of equipment, furniture and materials, as well as support and training for two years for the installation of a Montessori classroom. This will allow us to receive training in the Montessori Method and apply it in our preschool classrooms.

This award will help Yspaniola boost our early childhood education initiatives. This was our first year working with 3-year-olds who started in our pre-kindergarten classes, because we understand the importance of early childhood education and have had great results.

For example, now that the school year has ended, most of our children can say their first and last name (55%), name parts of the body and count objects from 1 to 5 (73%), they can also recognize weather conditions ( 55%) and eat by themselves with a spoon and wash their hands (82%).

We are excited about this expansion project, because it will help our students to continue advancing with a new methodology and in a renovated space.

As a first step, some members of Yspaniola visited the Dream Project facilities on May 11 and 12 to make the first observations of the Montessori Method. The purpose of this visit was to learn how the classrooms are organized and thus prepare ourselves to make these changes in our space at the end of this month and beginning of September.

We have already collected our space and although it looks sad and empty without children or furniture, we are preparing with great enthusiasm for the next school year. What a thrill! The remodel of our preschool is starting soon!

Culture area

Language area

On the way

Waiting for furniture and remodeling

Daily life area

Links:

Winning the Montessori Prize (Monthly Newsletter)

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