By Chonita Pablo Lacan and Julia Pretsfelder | Development Team
Last week, Mano a Mano’s primary school students had their first reading workshop of 2019. We do these activities because most students in our community do not read in their households. Unfortunately, the mere act of reading a story before bed with your parents would be a luxury here in Santiago Atitlán. This is largely due to a lack of resources for books at home along with the low literacy rates among older generations. In this activity, we wanted to develop students’ interest in reading as we believe that reading is a wonderful source of knowledge that opens many doors for more opportunities. We hope that our students can learn about topics that interest them and expand their critical and analytical abilities through reading.
Our younger students read the story “A Head Full of Colors” about a very envious little boy whose emotions are expressed through the colors of his hair. As many of the younger students are beginners in reading, our program coordinator, Chonita, added images alongside the text to ensure that everyone understood while practicing reading together. Chonita then lead a discussion about empathizing with the characters you come across in books with the hopes that each student could understand the joy of identifying with a text.
By the end of the story, the envious boy ends up bald, but he makes his bald head into a canvas for painting colors, deciding to do away with jealousy and channel his emotions into creativity. After discussing the story as a group, each student drew their own reaction. We were very proud of our youngest student, Damariz, who barely knows how to read but was very excited and artistic about reflecting on the story through drawing. An older student, Diego, also impressed us with his imagination when drawing a head full of colors and emotion.
In spite of the positive response to this reading workshop, we can tell that many of our students need more motivation and interest to read on their own. The lack of opportunities for developing a love of reading in our community is why we need to keep supporting this academic space for young students.
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