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Monday, November 21, 2016

Along the Road there is a School

I was happy to return this week to the dependable and hard-working Young Writers club at the junior secondary United Methodist Heritage High School on Malaforia Road leading out of Kabala, in Sierra Leone's Northern Province.

The club is fortunate to be accommodated in a new classroom with ready-made furniture, but it takes more than that to build a group of persistent writers.  It takes a principal and club facilitators who see the value in each of the steps involved in the writing process, and who patiently keep encouraging the students forward until they benefit from the eventual rewards.

The principal in this school is Mrs. Daisy Sankoh, and the teachers (pictured here) are Mr. Paul M. Conteh and Mr. Sannah D. Samura. We appreciate their support and are glad to see the students' final drafts on the classroom wall for all to read!

And what are the eventual rewards that students gain from SELI Young Writers clubs?  They learn to read in English, because by the time they have finished a final draft they have read it 6 or 8 times. They learn to write in English, and learn as many of the skills associated with writing as they work on acquiring: paragraphing, punctuation, capitalization, avoiding repetition, moving from narrative to dialogue and back again, and so on. They learn to listen in English so they can respond to others' writing and learn to speak in English while they explain their meaning to others in their content conference groups.

We wish this Young Writers club well as they move through the 2016-2017 school year.


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