Kabala Secondary School Senior Club

The senior Young Writers club at Kabala Secondary School has been meeting in this well-lighted space adjacent to the school library.

This club, too, was overwhelmed by new intake last week because the SSI students, who have been waiting for their JSS exit-exam results since school opened in September, have now begun attending senior secondary school. Here you see one of the club facilitators, Abdul Karim Koroma, giving an orientation. The principal, Mr. H.B. Conteh, assured us that new accommodation would be arranged so everyone would have a place to sit and write.

One of the students is holding the Young Voices newsletter issue 4.1. The poem on the back page was written by a member of the group.

A Senior Secondary Club

The Seli River Writing Project now has writing clubs in two senior secondary schools in the Koinadugu district in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone. Here you see the club members at work in their airy, spacious classroom at Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School.

The two facilitators, Sheku Bilo Conteh and Mohamed Ato Koroma, in their soft-spoken way, run a well-organized club. Two events happened today.

One event was that the first-year students (SSI) have just begun attending the school: all this time they have been out of school waiting for their BECE results! Eighteen of them arrived to join the club today.

The second event was that heats for their interhouse competitions began today, so a number of regulars are absent. Many of those that went to the heats are boys so the club membership appears today to have a higher percentage of girls than is actually the case.

You see here one of several conferencing groups that was going on in the room. The students are listening to someone read her work aloud, and jotting down content questions they plan to ask during the discussion of her piece.

Kabala JSS Young Writers Club

This is what content conferencing looked like at Kabala Junior Secondary School last week. It's all about explaining and negotiating meaning in English, which is not easy for these students who have only recently left primary school. Still, they do it with spirit because they are writing about their own personal experiences, which they know very well.

Facilitators Alieu S. Kanu and Fatmata Kamara conduct well-organized Young Writers club meetings. This club meets at 4:30 in the afternoon, after students have had a chance to go home and eat lunch, wash their uniforms, and do some of their chores. This is why you don't see the students wearing uniforms here.

The photo below is a peer editing group in the same meeting.

Students knew how to help each other edit in this club. The authors read their work aloud for their peers, and they reached for dictionaries when they needed them.