Support education throughout COVID-19 in Sri Lanka

Dear Supporter,

We thank you for your generosity, kindness and support towards Street Child’s home-based learning initiative in the North and East of Sri Lanka. We are pleased to share an update on project progress with you, along with a few case studies from the field.

Sri Lanka remains vulnerable to the effects of COVID-19 with the country currently under a nationwide lockdown. Prolonged school closures continue to threaten the long-term prospects of the children in the most marginalised communities.

Our home-based learning intervention along with your loyal support will continue to play a vital role in the coming weeks and months, as students navigate their education and the uncertainties of the pandemic.

Street Child have continued to expand this programme to reach more students and encourage the continuation of learning amongst students. We thank you for your ongoing support and look forward to sharing further updates and progress of our reach with you soon.

Case Study from a student: Learning is fun and interesting

I quickly learnt how to use this program in a systematic way that resulted to learn English happily. The key methodology is first listen, then listen and repeat and finally read along. This simple steps helped me to get the correct pronunciation, Listen and repeat helped me to read correctly and read along helped me to read without fear. As it is the school book recordings and supplementary videos, it was good for me to understand the subject.

During the Covid-19 pandemics, all the schools were closed in our country, that time Home based English learning which is really helped me to keep myself busy with study at home. As I preparing for the Grade 5 exam, I used to study English by using flash drives. Really I like this programme and I learnt to read with correct pronunciation and many new words, many action songs which are connected with our text book. In schools, we used to have short time for each subject and I rarely study English at home before as I have just text book which is boring, but now at home, I used to use flash drive for 1-2 hours every day as I have more time to learn.

This program is very easy to use and interesting to learn. Now I am confident in reading the text book without fear. I am lucky to have this flash drive. On the whole, got interest to learn English and got courage to read and speak.

Case Study from a primary English teacher: Gained confidence in teaching

The home based program is a good initiative and very useful for students and implemented on the right time to engage and create opportunities for the children to learn from homes and this program allows to continue their studies without any interruption though schools closed. As it is an offline program many students got opportunity to learn. In addition, we conducted online classes as well but only few were participated due to the lack of internet access and required devices.

When the schools resumed, I could see the improvement in the student’s English knowledge. The parents also reported that program was useful, interesting and easy to use and our children have learning resource at home to continue the learning.

It was my fortunate to participate in the English teacher training. The training was very useful, interactive and informative. I learnt a lot on teaching methodology and preparing teaching resources on Activity based Oral English (ABOE) which contributing me to improve my art of teaching and gained confidence to use the projector as a teaching aid through the practical training.