By Rana Dajani | Founder and Director
In the past 4 months, We have conducted 6 follow-up sessions for the We Love Reading trainings in three cities in Jordan Amman, Jerash (in Gaza camp), and Rusaifa.
The Number of Ambassadors who attended the following sessions was 149 Ambassadors.
During the follow-up sessions, the ambassadors learned the basics of writing children's books and shared their experiences with conducting reading sessions with children.
We Love Reading and UNESCO Cege@ Club jointly conducted a workshop at the “José Rojas” Reading Center in Guanajuato, Mexico. The workshop aimed to guide the participants through the registration process on the WLR online training 29 and after the workshop 29 ambassadors received the online training.
In addition to that We have trained 104 new trainees on our online training platform, and new ambassadors have joined our ambassador network from Mexico, Uganda, and Kenya.
We also published a study under the title “Facial emotion recognition in refugee children with a history of war trauma”.
Currently, more than 36 million children face displacement due to war, yet our understanding of the impact of such experiences on their socioemotional development, particularly in relation to facial expression perception, remains limited.
This study examines the repercussions of war trauma exposure on the recognition of facial emotions in children. Our focus is on Syrian refugee children (n = 130, Mage = 9.3 years, 63 female) and Jordanian non-refugee children (n = 148, Mage = 9.4 years, 66 female) residing in Jordan, with data collected between 2019 and 2020. While the two groups differed in trauma exposure, there were no discernible variations in their mental health measures.
Experiment 1 involved assessing children's biases in perceiving emotions through morphed facial expressions, revealing no significant differences between refugees and non-refugees. In Experiment 2, we employed a unique perceptual scaling task that circumvents semantic knowledge, yet again found no distinctions in facial expression discrimination between the two groups. Lastly, Experiment 3 tracked children's eye movements as they identified the facial expressions of Middle Eastern actors, revealing no disparities in identification accuracies or scanning strategies between the groups.
In summary, our findings suggest that exposure to war-related trauma and displacement during early development, as reported by caregivers but not always recollected by the child, does not seem to impact the recognition of facial expressions.
We published another research entitled “Executive Functions in Jordanian Children: What Can the Hearts and Flowers Task Tell Us About Development in a Non-Western Context” in the Cognition and development scientific Journal.
This study investigates the applicability of a commonly used executive functions (EFs) assessment task, Hearts and Flowers (HF), in a non-Western sample of Jordanian children aged 5.5–8.5 years. The research aims to assess the task's value in measuring EFs development in this population and explores associations between task performance, socioeconomic variables, and parent-reported academic achievement and behaviors. The results indicate the task's effectiveness in distinguishing performance among EFs constructs but reveal no age differences in EFs performance. Instead, EFs are linked to paternal education and the location of residence (Jordanian governorate), highlighting the importance of considering measurement and generalizability biases in global developmental science.
We published our latest books (The Peppered Moth, Arabic, and English versions, Queen of Balloons the English version)
These books come as a tool to heighten children's awareness regarding climate change and water poverty, and to highlight the importance of understanding organisms and their natural diversity, as well as the process of evolution and coexistence with other organisms.
Since that the critical issues of water resources and climate change stand out as a paramount global challenge, demanding immediate attention. This challenge presents a broad spectrum of opportunities to explore diverse solutions and cultivate awareness across all age groups.
A total of 1349 books were distributed in the past 4 months, each woman received a book package to start her own library, the package contains books that are fun, creative, and unleash the children’s imaginations. Books are developed according to set criteria and methodology, taking into account factors such as theme, relevancy to the children’s culture and background, language, and age-appropriateness. The books cover a variety of themes, including environmental awareness, empathy, gender, non-violence, disabilities, climate change, and refugees. Your donations also helped us conduct research to assess the repercussions of war trauma exposure on the recognition of facial emotions in children.
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