Improve education for Nepali girls and minorities

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.