Developing Children's Literature

I am excited about SELI's coming year. 

The SELI Young Writers Clubs program continues to develop the literacy of upper primary and junior secondary students; for some, improving their performance on public exams and for others, revealing their new selves as authors. Their facilitators report ex-club members asking how to move forward into creative writing. 

A real need exists in Sierra Leone for children's literature—good reading books. They need to be culturally relevant. As an advocate of children's literature and ex-school librarian, I make good use of SELI's children's library (see photo here)

as an inspiration for editing.

Increasingly, people in Sierra Leone are writing for children, but a good many are unable to get their work published because they lack editing support. SELI would like to provide such individualized early-stage writing guidance on drafts that such authors are considering submitting for publication. There would be no cost to the author for this service.  It would be provided by email or WhatsApp, or when available, in person. 

SELI is not a publisher. This editing service is intended to help point the authors' way to preparing a more successful draft (and hopefully then, more successful subsequent drafts) for submission to a children's book publisher. 

So let the new year in!

 

Celebrate World Literacy Day!

Today, September 8th, is World Literacy Day.

Please celebrate it by contributing any way, anywhere you can.

Partnering for Full Coverage

For the month of August, SELI is again delighted to be partnering with Transformation Education in their annual training to improve Class 1-3 literacy instruction.

SELI is also very glad that Moses M. Gbondo—a very able SELI Young Writers after school club facilitator for nine years now, as well as the acting school principal of Abundant Grace International School in Sussex—willingly agreed to carry out the presentation in my absence.

Our purview is as before: the writing aspect of early literacy. Topics we are covering are a) characteristics of classrooms where writing is taught well in an ESL setting, b) literacy and the brain, c) the writing process, and d) writing genres for classes 1-3. Lots of hands-on, practical work, of course!

Although heritage languages are not part of this training, we at SELI are glad to hear that Sierra Leone language literacy is being brought into schools in classes 1-3 in the near future. These literacy-teaching skills can be used to bring about literacy in children in whatever languages they may speak.

Join Our Writing Community

The Seli River Writing Project is growing an online writing community at the SRWP Workshop. It's free! Join us to share in the fun of trying different kinds of writing for the reward of gentle critique.

Our goals are

• developing life-long habits of writing, 
• building a writing community that believes everyone can learn to write, and 
• improving our writing and communication skills in English.

You're welcome!

Writing Back

Happy New Year, everyone! SELI would like to thank each and every individual person who has contributed to its efforts in the past year. We are so indebted to you!

Ebola has hampered our activities in the past six months—and this is only an understatement of what being out of school for an entire school year has done to a whole nation of students. We live every minute of every day hoping that the Ebola infection rate will subside soon and desist from taking its terrible toll in Sierra Leone. 

SELI has begun a new Seli River Writing Project called Writing Back. Its purpose is to restart the writing activity of as many junior and senior secondary members of SELI’s Young Writers clubs as we can during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Because schools are closed, the conditions under which these clubs normally operate—the school settings, the workshop-style meetings, the box of supplies, and each person’s files of ongoing work—are currently unavailable.  Yet we’ll be writing to each other, and writing back. Watch the blog, and we’ll be giving you more information as it evolves!

You Can't Talk to Ebola

Always rifle-shaped, the virus

used to ride on scowls.

Came in clusters piled snarling

on roofs and backs of trucks.

Shoulder-butted. Ready-charged.

We've come. Hand over your youth

or yield to our torch.

I'd greet them;

hail one, and they'd all turn,

distracted.

How's your mother?

Did the tablets ease her pain?

Mock their faces—

what frowns!

We've no food, sir.

They'd reach for my gifts and leave,

all those long gray barrels

resting on their knees.

And the virus

adapted. Barreled still, but earless,

piggybacking on smiles.

On children come to plead.

We love them,

we feed them.

And then we're cracked apart.

Our slain youth here, now,

wait for transport, laid out

upon the hearth.

© 2014 Jacqueline Leigh

Peace Corps–Sierra Leone Staff Development

During May, SELI has been conducting an eight-session staff development training in Business Writing for the Peace Corps–Sierra Leone staff.

We've all enjoyed the sessions, mixing writing skills (style, cohesion and paragraphs) with genre writing and ongoing job writing requirements.

This is a great group of people to work with and they perform such an important function in Peace Corps–Sierra Leone. Hope we've been able to enhance that a bit.

Process Writing for Researcher Trainees

SELI gave a presentation on process writing to the Institute for Development's Researcher Trainee program at the British Council on May 14th.

This morning's session was twice as long as the March session we conducted with IfD trainees. We therefore delivered less and interacted more—all good—and with the support of Maryam, the trainer today, our presentation linked into the whole training better.

Everyone was very engaged and they asked a lot of good questions. I very much like nonfiction writing and research, myself. I enjoyed the morning, and I hope they did, too! 

World Storytelling Day

Thursday, March 20th, is World Storytelling Day. Are you ready?

The theme for 2014 is Monsters and Dragons . Get started writing now, so you can tell your story aloud to someone tomorrow! Just in case you need help, click here for some good names for your creatures.

Happy writing, and let us know how your storytelling went! 

Where Are the People of Color?

"Then I read a story by James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues.” I didn’t love the story, but I was lifted by it, for it took place in Harlem, and it was a story concerned with black people like those I knew. By humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s story also humanized me. The story gave me a permission that I didn’t know I needed, the permission to write about my own landscape, my own map."

In this quote from his New York Times opinion piece, "Where Are the People of Color in Children's Books?" children's book author Walter Dean Myers is asking an important question.  The publishers of this catalogue of children's books written in Sierra Leone and Liberia, also wanted the children who read them to recognize themselves and their own "landscapes" as they read.

Five Writing Lessons: A New Take

SELI presented for a few hours at TISLL's (The Institute for Sierra Leonean Languages) Literacy Teacher/Facilitator Workshop, held Monday-Friday, May 27-31st in Freetown. The workshop trained people to teach literacy to nonliterate people in their mother tongue. Five different languages were represented.

On Wednesday, SELI introduced the idea that all classes are diverse: even in basic literacy classes there are always advanced learners that need to be challenged, and process writing can do this--a form of differentiated instruction. In this photo I'm presenting concepts, but then we went on to the practical: each participant drafted a personal piece of writing in his or her own language and then shared it in language groups in a content conference. It did not surprise us that many of the participants had never written a personal experience in their own language before. For nearly all Sierra Leoneans, the only road to literacy is through English. But the hardest part of the presentation was stopping the content conferences! Everyone was having such a good time being writers in their own language and having writing to share and discuss, that they didn't want to stop!

Five Writing Lessons (FWL)  Collaborating with TISLL has shown SELI how to make its Five-Writing-Lessons project work. This project been a struggle. After the first two successful units, in Kuranko and Krio, we could not seem to move forward. Even repeated radio announcements did not attract educated Sierra Leoneans to this opportunity of becoming writers (and potentially one day, authors) in their own languages.

By way of contrast, TISLL already operates literacy centers in six languages where adults and young people gain literacy in their mother tongues. TISLL also has literacy materials and the expertise to teach literacy. It is the only organization in the country that works exclusively with indigenous languages. The difference is that unlike the SELI FWL program, TISLL literacy classes teach initial, beginning literacy.  But what a great opportunity this provides us!  Literacy that is not maintained, can be lost.  What better way to empower and motivate TISLL's newly literate students than to include them in a writing workshop?

SELI is excited to be partnering with TISLL, and hope our contributors to the Five Writing Lessons project agree.

Reading Sierra Leone

On May 10th, eight Reading Sierra Leone books were officially launched--hooray! You see here one of the eight.

To quote from the inside back cover, "Reading Sierra Leone is a collaborative initiative of PEN Sierra Leone and CODE, a Canadian NGO supporting development through education. The goal of Reading Sierra Leone is to produce locally written and illustrated books that engage children and invite them, through reading and writing, to think, to learn and to improve their lives."

The books are aimed at lower, middle, and upper primary reading levels and are part of a program providing huge numbers of books, as well as teacher training in reading instruction, to primary schools in Sierra Leone, beginning with schools in the eastern part of the country.

You can look through, and learn how to purchase, all the Reading Sierra Leone as well as the Reading Liberia books in this catalog. 

Sales will help finance a second round of locally-produced books under Reading Sierra Leone. Let's make this happen! (P.S.: We're told Reading Liberia is in its third round!)

Reading Sierra Leone

Lε Wi Ɔl Lan ("Let's all learn!") aims to improve learning outcomes for girls and boys in Sierra Leone. One of the strategies is to train at least 40 teacher trainers and 160 teachers in teaching reading and writing by the end of the second year. Trained teachers will receive regular professional support. Lε Wi Ɔl Lan hopes to improve the reading and writing performance for students in class one to junior secondary school. A complementary project, Reading Sierra Leone, provides students and teachers access to a variety of high quality reading materials. During the first year, CODE Canada brought in more than 200,000 reading materials for the project while conducting workshops in partnership with PEN SL to train writers and illustrators to tell inspiring local stories. Eight books from these local stories have now been published (pssssst: the SELI director wrote one of them!) The launching will take place soon! Here's where you can get your catalog of the Liberian and Sierra Leonean titles.

Lε Wi Ɔl Lan is coordinated by the International Rescue Committee. CODE Canada leads the teacher-training components of the project, and CODE is also the lead for Reading Sierra Leone.

The SELI Young Writers

We're excited about the SELI Young Writers: our new writing class for senior secondary students. We plan to write in all sorts of styles and genres. We are doing journaling, and we write in multiple drafts, reading our work aloud for feedback. We are also stretching vocabularies as far as we can!

Everyone in the class wants personally to become a better writer, and everyone also wants to succeed in school. We plan to do both!

Publishing our Writing

Starting with issue 3.1, the Young Voices newsletter of the SRWP (Seli River Writing Project) will be publishing the writing of our Young Writers during the coming year. (Check out Young Voices 2.1).

All Young Writers receive a typewritten copy of their final drafts that to show their family and friends. Selected pieces will make it into the newsletters. To the extent that our finances permit, issues will be shared among the participating schools and to friends and supporters of the SRWP. Few of our students have access to the internet, but the newsletter will be posted here, too, so watch for Young Voices 3.1 and expect to see Young Voices often to catch up on what the students are writing about and on progress in the SRWP. This will give the students' writing wider exposure than do the in-school notice boards where some schools display Young Writers writing.

Would you like to support SRWP newsletter production during the year? Please make a PayPal contribution using the Donate button on the right! 

Chapter Books

The Young Writers from the Seli River Writing Project who have written five or more personal experiences in their clubs, were given the opportunity at the end of the school year to prepare My Life booklets.

Each one chose the sequence in which their experiences would appear as chapters in the book.  They also prepared a dedication and an "About the Author" paragraph to appear at the end.

It's an exciting moment for all authors to walk off with their first new book in their hands, and a wonderfully validating experience for these junior secondary students.  We congratulate each one of them for the perseverance it took to get through so many drafts of at least five different topics.

Five Writing Lessons

Five Writing Lessons, a program of the Heritage Writers project, has begun at SELI! The opening unit is Kuranko, and the first of the five lessons took place today at SELI. Thanks to sponsorship from individuals from many parts of the world, we plan to conduct a unit of five writing lessons in as many Sierra Leone languages as possible.

Each class has up to sixteen participants. All should be primary language speakers of the language of any age who have reached or completed junior secondary school, and who are interested in authoring books in their language. The class is offered free of charge.

We are seeking funding for the next stage in the Heritage Writers project, which will support the writing efforts of these would-be mother-tongue authors, and take them onto publication. Exciting, no? Be a part of it by contributing at www.seli.co. Click on "DONATE" to make your payment through PayPal.

Sponsor a Writer! (a Heritage Writers initiative)

Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee of SL PEN

SELI hosts and chairs the Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee of Sierra Leone PEN, and has just developed this brochure which expresses the committee's vision of what it would like to accomplish.

Are these your interests, too? Contact SL PEN at the numbers given in the brochure and let them know about your support. And do join SELI in its annual celebration of International Mother Language Day every February 21st at 14F Clarke St., Tengbeh Town!

Content Conferences are at the Heart of it All

Content conferences are where voices are drawn out. Middle school authors are reading their work aloud for feedback from their peers and from teacher Abu B.S. Marah in this Young Writers content conference at Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School, Kabala in Sierra Leone. It's the first month of a new year for the SELI Young Writers club at AMASS, and half the group are newcomers just arrived from primary school.

The students are either getting feedback on first or second drafts, so they can move on to better revision or editing. All the clubs have new editing corners this year, with SELI's donation of two new dictionaries. It's rough this year with no grants to support the Seli River Writing Project,but we are carrying on!