Literacy classes

This year our local translator Elder Harre asked us to continue to offer literacy classes to both children and adults in our village of Ranvetlam.  Because we are the village where Bible translation is based, he wanted us to also be the village of great readers of the translation!  I teach a kids literacy class every Monday afternoon for an hour or so and an adult class Sunday afternoons when I can wrangle them in.

Kids showing up for our literacy activity.

Contest to match a sentence to its corresponding picture

Gwen and Addy watched the heaps to try to help the activity flow best.  The Richards kids help me a lot in literacy class!

  

Contest in action.

 

Hand washing station before we start our lesson.  Hand washing isn't common in the villages so this keeps my classroom set of books clean and nice and contributes to hygiene practices too.

Teaching the lesson.  My helper, Nini, is in the orange shirt on the left in the front.  Sometimes she teaches the first half of the lesson for me.

Sounding out the letters they know so far.

Kids reading one of the easy readers in small groups.

Anderson (15) came with a US work team and slogged along with the rest of the kids to read together in language.  :)

 See the video below and its description for what is going on in this activity.

Literacy activity where I ask "who has __?___?" and the child who has that letter or word stands and we all read the letters/words in order.

A ladies group in my adult literacy class identifying the letters we know so far on each page.

George and Elder Harre are our two main local translators, but they still come to adult literacy class, which is great!

Wotan and Lala working together.  Lala (R) is one of my local helpers.

Marrro and Matal identifying letters.

Lili and Elsie looking through the letters.  Elsie is another helper with my children's literacy class.

Reading through a story in the Family Story Bible.

See if you can recognize the story - it's a Bible one!  No?  It's the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.  The video shows us reading until the end when I am saying where the story is found in the full Bible.  We read slow so no one gets (too) lost!  We get great Biblical questions from the adults who come!

Group reading practice in the adult class.  We read the easy readers in these groups before going on to the harder stuff in the Family Story Bible together!

One of the men's groups.  The young men are pretty good natural readers right off the bat.

Poor adults don't get any snacks, but I'm pretty sure some of the kids only come to literacy class for the free popcorn at the end!  Here are Addy and Gwen passing out popcorn that Gretchen so faithfully makes each Monday afternoon for us!