Your Weekly Update: Libraries & Literacy - Together We Learn

Literacy & Libraries

We hope to see more and more of this across our Ethiopian Link Schools!

I’d like to welcome you all to this Weekly Update from the Link Ethiopia School Links team!

We’re taking a good look at our latest major project – our Literacy and Libraries project, funded in part by the Waterloo Foundation. This project will be across 40 of our Link Schools, but we hope that with your help, we can increase this number and improve the reading facilities across many more of our Ethiopian Schools!

At Link Ethiopia, we believe that education is a route out of poverty, and the Waterloo Foundation supports this. Our aim with this project is to improve the library facilities available to students, as well as ensuring these facilities are equipped with the appropriate reading material necessary for study and learning – we aim to create an environment conducive for a quality education.

We have £26,000 for the first two stages of the project, which will allow us to carry out this project in 40 schools, across both the Northern and Southern regions of Ethiopia in which we work. But our hope is to be able to bring this project to 60 schools in need of improved literacy and reading facilities.

This means that we are seeking an additional contribution of £13,000 to enable us to reach our target goal of 60 schools. Not an incredible sum, but one that we really could use your help and support!

If each of our 150 UK Link Schools raised just £100, we would easily smash that target, and be able to run this amazing project across 3/4 of our Ethiopian schools!

£661 for each of our Ethiopian Link Schools would allow us to carry out the project, which is detailed further below. I will also suggest some great fundraising options!

The support of our Link Schools here in the UK could really mean the difference for this project, and would allow it to have a much greater impact! If you think you and your school would be interested and able to help, please get in touch with me, or our Projects & Fundraising Manager at [email protected].

Thanks for reading! Until next week – Caio!

Sponsorship & School Links Manager

[email protected]

The Project

One of our previous library projects at Keta Elementary in Debre Zeit

For the project, each participating school will:

1) Be trained in and participate in the School Library Award

2) Be provided with an additional 100 contextually/curriculum relevant books

3) Trained in and set up reading clubs. A manual has been developed in a pilot project which provides activities for reading clubs (both general and specific to Ethiopian folktales – see http://www.ethiopianfolktales.com/). The reading club will also include outreach activities to promote community reading/storytelling, once every two months.

4) Receive a 1 Day Training programme, with follow up observations, in improved reading practice to introduce “bite-sizeâ€ storytelling or reading sessions lasting up to 20 minutes every day for each class and for all the grades.

5) Be trained in the teaching of phonics and provided with free phonic resources (Link Ethiopia has a partnership will the UK organisation THRASS who provide free phonic resources to schools). Currently Ethiopian schools do not teach phonics but the USAID 2010 report recommended its introduction.

6) Introduce peer reading activities through appointment of male and female class “reading champions”

7) Introduce “Reading Bee competition” to create reading culture and embedding libraries as the centre of learning activities within the schools.

8) Create a library link with an existing partner school in the UK including joint activities around particular books/folktales.

You can read & learn more on our Literacy Project page on our website.

Fundraising

Fundraising for the Literacy & Libraries project would obviously be a big commitment from your school – but we also know that schools and students love the fun and excitement a great fundraising opportunity brings.

So, to make your fundraising efforts as fun and easy as possible, Link Ethiopia will be helping you wherever and whenever we can!

The first step – Creating a Virgin Money giving page is a great way of setting yourself up with a really easy-to-use and professional fundraising platform.

From here you can simply and easily reach out to the wider school community and beyond!

The next step – Planning some innovating and fun fundraising activities, to coincide with major school calendar events – such as the Summer Fair – is (as you’ll certainly know better than me!) a great way to get as many students, staff and parents involved (and donating money) as possible!

Our Fundraising Guide has loads of great suggestions for fundraising ideas for our schools and Link Coordinators! And we have a wealth of resources and materials you can use to promote it, and to make Fair stalls look as fun and Ethiopian as we can! Just have a look on the resources page on our website, or get in touch to discuss your ideas personally.

We also have items that would be great for selling and raising money on any Summer Fair stalls – our Wristbands being the most colourful and fun. But we also have Link Ethiopia pens, badges and stickers which have proved popular at fundraising fairs in the past! We also have some beautiful Ethiopian crosses that can be sold to raise funds! Please get in touch if you’re interested in using any of these items in your fundraising activities!

Finally, another really easy and simple way of raising money for this project is to use the Give as you Live online fundraising website, which donates money to us everytime that you shop online! It couldn’t be easier to set-up (have a look at last week’s Weekly Update for more info on this) – all you need to do is click on the image next to this to get started!