Literacy for Dominican-Haitian Youth in the Batey

Striving for quality and inclusion

At Yspaniola, we envision a Dominican Republic where all students can access inclusive, high-quality education. The difficulties and disruption of 2020 greatly impacted our work, however, in February 2021 we came back to our socially-distanced, COVID-safe classrooms with great energy, striving as always to find new ways to strengthen our preschool programming. 

Our preschool classes aim to help our students to develop basic literacy skills, as well as other key cognitive and non-cognitive skills such as socio-emotional, problem-solving and motor skills. All these abilities have proven to be crucial in building a foundation for lifelong learning capacities as children grow. This work all underpins Yspaniola’s aim to encourage children to become happy learners and community leaders with a will to share their learnings and be creative in overcoming the obstacles that life will bring.

We have also recently been working to review and update our education metrics as we strive to provide high quality literacy and skills training. Based on both our internal curriculum and international best practice standards, our newest set of learning goals will help us to better track our students' progress over time and zero in on activities to build key skills. 

Each Thursday, our preschoolers have “Reading Hour”, where their teachers conduct a readaloud of one of their favorite books. Followed by a related activity. In February, our students celebrated International Mother Language Day with a book entitled “Haiti Is”, by talented Haitian-American author Cindy Similien. Amazingly, Cindy was able to call in to our session and speak with the students!

The bilingual read aloud allowed students to discover and discuss their Haitian cultural heritage, and the beauty of haitian landscapes. For many, Haiti is the country where their parents or grandparents were born, or sometimes where they were born themselves. For others, it was an occasion to discover more about the culture and heritage of their classmates. 

As always, Yspaniola is deeply grateful to all of our GlobalGiving donors. Your support is critical to the success of our organization and the continuation of our programs. We will update you on our plans for 2021-2022 school year in our next report. In the meantime, we want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for supporting us and following our work!

-The Yspaniola Team.

Links:

• http://www.yspaniola.org