Campaign campaign live! Join us in the Big Give Christmas Challenge from the 3rd to 10th December. We’re striving to raise £16,000, and here’s the exciting part – every donation will be matched, meaning if we hit £8,000 this week, an additional £8,000 will be contributed! We will be using the funds raised to create …
2023 Phonics Update Together We Learn started working with Jolly Phonics in 2013 (formerly as Link Ethiopia), initially as our ‘Libraries and Literacy’ project. The project’s aim has always been to improve the English literacy skills of children in Ethiopia by training their teachers in the Jolly Phonics teaching method. Jolly phonics helps teachers to teach English …
An online event to support small charities in Ethiopia Join us on Ethiopian new year to hear from author Elizabeth Laird about her work and Ethiopia travels. This online event is in support of Small But Significant, a network of small UK-Ethiopian charities, of which Together We Learn is a member. Elizabeth Laird is an …
Why use phonics? Teaching English using phonics teaches children to read by recognising the sounds that makeup words instead of memorising whole words or learning letter names. For example, cat has three sounds ‘c’ ‘a’ and ’t’ and chair has two sounds ‘ch’ and ‘air’. This method is now part of the national curriculum in …
What is phonics? Together We Learn has been partnering with Jolly Phonics to train Ethiopian teachers to use the phonics method of teaching English. Instead of memorising words, children are taught the 42 sounds of English, which include the 26 alphabet sounds plus sounds such as ‘ch’ ‘sh’ ‘ee’ and ‘ay’. Teaching children these sounds …
Super Rabbits -The Adventures of Fluffy & Truffle Ethiopian-born Helena is 11 years old. She now lives in the UK, and she spent lockdown writing a children’s book that would help raise money to support other children in Ethiopia. Super Rabbits – The Adventures of Fluffy & Truffle is the result and profits from the …
An Update on our Early Years English Improvement Project Teaching English makes you think a lot about how words are spelt and how they sound. Words like tough, bough, cough and dough look similar but sound completely different. And starting from the other direction, words like sight and site sound the same but don’t look …
Kindu Klub: Abdu’s Story When Abdu’s mother first came to Together We Learn for sponsorship support, the family was living in very bad conditions and they didn’t have enough to eat. This extreme poverty resulted in malnutrition, a lack of hygiene and little hope for a better life. Abdu weighed only 3 kilos at the …
Teacher Training: Fenta’s Story In a national assessment, the Ethiopian Ministry of Education found that six in ten grade 4 students have a ‘below basic’ proficiency in English. This is a problem because when students move to secondary school, all lessons are taught in English. Many teachers themselves struggle with English as their second language …
Did you know that English has 42 phonic sounds? Over the last academic year we have been working with grade one teachers in nine schools to teach English using the phonics method. So far, we have trained 36 teachers to effectively use the phonics method in their classrooms! We have seen incredible results this year, …