By Zoe Colgin | Communications and Development Associate
In communities like Enoosaen, there are no local bookstores or public libraries, and most schools lack the resources to provide students with a variety of reading material. As a result, children do not develop the habit of reading for pleasure. At Kakenya’s Dream, we know that reading not only leads to improved academic performance, but is also key to building children’s vocabulary, sparking curiosity, improving critical thinking, and introducing them to new concepts, places, and ideas. Therefore, we partnered with Storymoja, a creative Kenya-based organization that creates and publishes African storybooks, to nurture a lifelong love for reading in our girls.
Storymoja offers a wide array of African children’s books, academic textbooks, career literature, and more. Storymoja also runs an innovative program called Start a Library, which supplies school libraries with all of these different kinds of books and trains staff on developing reading programs within the school. Through this new partnership, Storymoja will lead capacity-building workshops for students, teachers, and librarians at KCE I and II on library management, student career counseling, strategies for bringing books to life for readers, and more. Storymoja will also support Kakenya’s Dream’s efforts to establish after-school reading clubs for students and assist with expanding and diversifying KCE I and II’s library selection with career guidance literature and storybooks by African authors.
During the last week of March, the Kakenya’s Dream-Storymoja partnership kicked off with a career guidance session for our high school students and a two-day teacher training workshop on library management. During the career guidance session, our students took their first career aptitude test. The test results identified a handful of career opportunities that match each student’s individual skillset and personality. Having grown up in a very remote community, our students were not aware of many of the career paths listed by the test results. Stroymoja gave them literature and resources to learn more about the career fields they matched with. The girls were thrilled to be matched with jobs and career paths they hadn’t heard of before, and were eager to explore them and learn more!
In our second workshop, our teachers and staff worked with the Storymoja team to develop strategies to encourage students' interest in reading. Together, they practiced integrating storybooks into our teachers' lesson plans to teach life skills and important academic concepts. By using more storybooks in the classroom, our teachers will continue to foster our students’ desire to continue reading outside of the classroom.
For students like ours who live in a very remote part of the world, books hold the power to expand their horizons by exposing them to the vast diversity of the human experience outside of their community. At Kakenya’s Dream, we believe in the importance of filling young minds not only with academia, but with fairytales, folklore, mystery, poetry, and more. We hope to help our students find the literature that sparks a lifelong love of reading, and we look forward to growing our partnership with Storymoja to achieve just that.
Your support ensures that we can continue to nurture the love of reading in our students. Thank you for joining us to empower girls through knowledge and education!
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By Jennica Stephenson | Assistant Director
By Zoe Colgin | Communications and Development Associate
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