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The writing is published!

Students push for the chance to read what the authors in their school's Young Writers club have written, now that some final drafts are published on the club's notice board outside the principal's office at Kabala Secondary School's Junior Secondary School.

And the clubs are underway!

Four Young Writersclubs are underway in the Koinadugu District, and here we see two authors doing peer-editing in the Dankawalie Secondary School club. A thunderstorm was going on while we were visiting this club on October 18th, but the drafting, conferencing, and revising all went on nonetheless. You can also see here a content conference going on at Kabala Secondary School's club. The author made a statement in his piece that one of the students thinks he needs more evidence for, and he will have to think about this when he writes his second draft.
I visited the four clubs in the Kabala area in the third week of October in the company of one of the facilitators of a Young Writersclub in Freetown, and we joined in the facilitating wherever we went. We have nothing but praise for the way these new clubs have begun.

Leading Young Writers in Kabala

SELI has just finished conducting the second 40-hour teacher training Leading Young Writers workshop, this time with ten teachers in the Kabala area, in the far north of Sierra Leone. The teachers will be facilitating process-writing Young Writers clubs in four schools there: Kabala Secondary School, Loma Secondary School, Dankawalie Secondary School, and Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School (AMASS). AMASS provided the venue for the workshop. It was a lively one and we were all sorry to see it end. Every activity added to the participants' expertise in one of three areas: the theory of teaching writing; the role of the facilitator; and participating in the writing process. The afternoon writing sessions simulated the Young Writers clubs themselves. The participants, many of whom had not known each other before, are determined to continue writing with the ongoing encouragement of their fellow participants and SELI.
SELI donated to each school a box of supplies to be used by the writing clubs.
Here, supplies are being handed over to the vice principal of Dankawalie Secondary School, Mr. Kargbo.
Young Writers clubs aim to develop young authors while they also improve the communication, cultural awareness, and thinking skills of junior secondary school students in the schools where they operate. SELI believes that writing is best taught by teachers who write, so as we visit the clubs during the year we will also be doing all we can to encourage the teachers in their own writing.

Celebrate National Youth Literacy Day!

It's National Youth Literacy Day today (August 26th)! Celebrate by making an $8.95 purchase that keeps SELI Youth Writers writing in Sierra Leone--the purchase of Fostering Young Writers in Sierra Leone! Just click on https://www.createspace.com/3458058, and you're there, reading all the personal experiences these dedicated writers have chosen to explain to you! All funds generated by the sale of the book are used solely to support SELI's educational programs in Sierra Leone.

Keep watching! The Leading Young Writers teacher training workshop in Kabala begins next week. Ten new teachers are being introduced to facilitating Young Writers clubs in their own schools, At the same time, they are going to start writing in process-writing workshops themselves, What a great way to reduce stress and fight teacher burnout--be a writer yourself, with the support of a writers' group in your area.

A Great Cause

We know it's important to you that SELI Young Writers clubs continue to encourage JSS students to write. Now there's a way you can make sure that happens! AND, to make sure the new clubs being opened in the Northern Province will be supported with in-servicing visits. You can make your contribution at http://www.causes.com/causes/509925?recruiter_id=143246679. Check it out!

You can read them, too!

A new book, Fostering Young Writers in Sierra Leone, edited by Jacqueline Leigh, makes it possible for you to read the writing of SELI's Young Writers clubs. Click the link here, or buy it on Amazon.com!

Fostering Young Writers in Sierra Leone is a collection of personal experiences of students in process-writing clubs in six schools in Freetown. After carrying out the writing process repeatedly on their chosen topics these students have come to see themselves, collectively, as authors. Readers gain insight into the society in which these children are growing up, and into the courage with which the students' voices leap from the pages. A foreword by the editor provides detail about the clubs, and the postscript explains where these writers might go from here, drawing on insights from James Moffett's work at the National Writing Project. All profits from the sale of this book support the writing programs of the Sentinel English Language Institute, the public charity conducting Young Writers clubs in Sierra Leone.

Fostering Young Writers in Sierra Leone is available now at https://www.createspace.com/3458058. We're also sending out complimentary copies in appreciation and recognition of donations of $50 or more to the Sentinel English Language Institute. Do let us know if you'd like to contribute at writing.SELI@yahoo.com.!

Writers All!

SELI is now sponsor of "Storytelling," a noon radio program on the nonprofit FM 96.0 community station, Voice of the Peninsula Mountains (this is the new station building, in Tombo). Each weekday members from the listening communities of Sattia, Tombo and Kent along the Freetown Peninsula tell traditional stories in one of five languages spoken in the area. A copy of each program is retained for SELI, and SELI is asking that they also write down these stories in five ledgers, one for each language.

SELI is also paying tutors from its Tutor Registry to provide three lessons that will teach literate adults to write in their primary languages. The first lessons are taking place this week: a certified Mende tutor is teaching someone to write in Kisi. Sure, the teacher does not speak Kisi, and sure, Mende is a Mande language, and Kisi is an Atlantic-Congo language. But it's working: the student feels equipped and energized and he has begun writing in Kisi!

Is this writing perfect? Are the writers using orthographic rules that experts would approve? Do all languages in Sierra Leone have established written orthographies? No. But we whose primary language is English tend to forget that it is only in the very recent past that our written rules have developed. What if Shakespeare had refrained from writing because there was no dictionary to consult? Even today, do writers worry about perfection in their first, second, or fifth drafts? Here's to the written voices of all these potential poets, storytellers, and novelists in Sierra Leone!

Let their publishers worry about the final product!

Ballanta's Course in Performing Arts and Media

SELI is again involved in developing and delivering the language arts syllabus for the Ballanta Academy of Music's course in Performing Arts and Media, which will be resuscitated in October following a year's break if the Academy can muster enough enrollment. You can see last year's students here in a playwriting session. This is a vocational course for post-BECE (junior secondary) students that offers music, drama and acting for screen, dance, studio engineering, and film/digital media. Sierra Leone very much needs more vocational options for post-BECE students, but the new programme needs enrollment to make it happen. In its new form, subjects are available in modules, to take in any order, to pick or not choose, or to take either intensively or spaced out over time, along with the required language arts and business math. The language arts syllabus is standards-based, and assessed primarily through real-life, contextual tasks. Ballanta is holding an orientation for potential students on May 22nd. We'll be there!

Health Unlimited, Sierra Leone

SELI has conducted the 8th of 12 writing workshops with the staff of Health Unlimited Sierra Leone, now called Health Poverty Action, in Murray Town. Every member of staff has been writing on his/her chosen personal experiences following the writing process. Whoever is in town on the day of the workshop is welcome: employees from Kamakwie, overseas consultants working with Health Unlimited, and Those Who Keep the Fort. At the beginning of each weekly session, we work with journals: we respond to photos, we write poems, we write first drafts of plays responding to images. . . You will love the cinquains and haiku posted on the notice board at the HU's entrance. It's been a delight getting to know each one of these special people. We all see that everyone has stories to tell, and that an inclination to poetry is in no way dependent upon educational background. No one could have a better job than I!

International Mother Language Day 2010

On 21st of February, 2010, the Sentinel English Language Institute (SELI) celebrated the 11th anniversary of UNESCO's International Mother Language Day, which promotes the viability and diversity of languages and culture. For this second annual celebration, SELI was joined by the local chapter of International PEN, Sierra Leone PEN, which shares SELI's concern for the preservation of all Sierra Leone languages and the development of their literatures. UNESCO assesses how endangered a language is by using a set of nine factors. One of these factors is whether an active literature exists in the language. Learn more about this event by opening the report pictured here.

We've Added Journals to our Club

The Young Writers club that had moved to the SELI facility a year ago, is now back in Services Junior Secondary School, Wilberforce. We're going strong! Here you see a content conference, and editing with dictionaries. We now start our meetings with dialogue/response journals, which encourages punctuality, stimulates creativity, lets me know what's going on in the students' lives, and makes mini-lessons more effective. Here's Fanta's haiku from her journal:

There are sixteen round
holes in the classroom window.
They bring fresh air in.

Alieu is reading his in this video.

Six rice bags standing
to separate the two classrooms.
The sticks hold them up.

We're grateful for recent donations from individuals to SELI that enabled us to buy additional materials for these clubs, such as files and markers to keep the students' drafts organized.