Improve education for Nepali girls and minorities

Our teacher training program is focused on reading aloud with children, but there is more to it than that. Once the initial sessions are over it’s important to us to continue to work with teachers and principals to develop programs that they would like to pursue with their students.

That’s how we found ourselves delivering two beehives and 10,000 bees to two of our partner schools, Jana Jyoti Primary School and Lali Gurans Primary School, in late April.

The initial group of teachers in our training program, in Kavre District, are now entering their third year with us. We asked them for suggestions of learning experiences that interested their students, and they told us about beekeeping.

The Community Forest Group of Kavre District and our partner organization, Kakshyalaya, conducted a two-day workshop about beekeeping for about 20 teachers from seven schools and 10 local residents. The training was conducted by Mr. Loknath Sapkota (secretary of the forest group) and Mr. Bachchu Karki (a local beekeeping expert).

We also held a separate one-day workshop for students at Jana Jyoti School to give them a fun, outdoor learning experience. A total of 48 students and eight teachers attended the training along with a handful of parents and the head of the school management committee.

The students were thrilled with the chance to get close to the bees and observe life in the hives. Squeals of delight and excitement filled the air as the younger students touched the bees. One of our goals was to help children overcome their fear of bees.

The training was designed to help children and adults understand how honey is made, manage bee stings, and identify different castes of colonies of bees and beehive products. Some even got to taste royal jelly, a honeybee secretion used to feed queen bee larvae.

Afterward, students designed a floral calendar for bees. The entire group discussed the reasons for the decline non-commercial bees and what people can we do to protect bees.

Your support helps us deliver new kinds of learning experiences to children in rural Nepal. Thank you!

Later this month we will sponsor a children’s literature festival at six schools as part of our read-aloud training program. Last year, we conducted a two-day literature festival that attracted 625 people, including students, teachers, parents, school management committee members, and local officials.

The purpose of the festival is not only to promote reading habits in children but also to give parents and community members an opportunity to visit the schools and learn more about the value of reading aloud with children.

Literature festivals are the culminating event of our read-aloud teacher training program, now in its second year. The goal of the training is to encourage teachers to read aloud to their students, improve child literacy and increase awareness of Nepali children’s literature in schools. At the festival, we will publicly recognize the teachers who have completed the training.

Before the festival, we will deliver books, bookshelves and low reading tables along with packages of stationary and play materials like classroom blocks. Teachers tell us that the reading corners we install in their classrooms encourage students to spend their spare time with their favorite books.

We also want to begin to track student literacy skills and measure the effect of the training. We conducted baseline surveys of 98 students, from first grade through fifth grade, at seven schools in Nuwakot district, where we are training teachers for the first time. We tested another 42 students from 4 schools in Kavre, where we are in our second year of training teachers.

Interestingly, the survey showed that younger students (in grades 1 to 3) in Kavre had higher reading proficiency than their peers in Nuwakot, but that advantage did not hold for older students in grades four and five, where children in Nuwakot performed better.

We will conduct another survey after the training is concluded.