Support Education in Dawasamu

Dear Supporters,

In order to track and monitor progress, assessments have been devised which ascertained each child's current comprehension and phonics ability.  The assessments are carried out three times a year at the beginning of each term in January, April, August, the data is compared, enabling each child's progress to be recorded as either +, = or -.

Through analysis of the data we identified progress of reading comprehension as an area of concern and decided to target this in the following ways:

• encourage volunteers to teach with more of a comprehension focus, even when working with groups of children who need support with their phonics,
• enable volunteers to feel more confident when teaching literacy lessons by creating a bank of resources to be used as starters, cool downs or main activities to support the teaching of different objectives,
• adapt the volunteer education training to explain and demonstrate more clearly how to plan and teach high quality literacy lessons using the specific resources available to us in Dawasamu. 

We were pleased to discover that the changes have indeed made a positive impact on reading comprehension progress, with higher percentages of students improving their score or maintaining the same score.  

We have been able to accelerate older students who struggle with reading, through the use of targeted phonics lessons.  These students, in classes 6, 7 and 8, received literacy tuition focusing on comprehension as their reading skills had improved enough for them to be able to access most basic texts.  

We continue to focus our attention on teaching literacy lessons covering the relevant year group objectives while working on our ongoing target of improving student comprehension.  Our long-term goal is to move towards teaching phonics lessons to only the lower classes (classes 1, 2 and 3), which we hope to make a reality by focusing targeted phonics interventions for students early on so that no child is left behind. We would like to thank all donors who have contributed to our “Dawasamu Education Project” in Fiji. 

With Gratitude,

Dawasamu Education