As part of the International Inspiration partnership which is an international project that will reach 12 million children from 20 different countries by 2012 we are partnered for the next few years with the Government Secondary School in Karu, Abuja in Nigeria. We made our visit to the school in March 2010 and recently it was the first time our Nigerian partners had come to our school in Cornwall.
One of the great outcomes that have already happened ahead of schedule as part of our partnership with Nigeria is the Reading to you Karu project. As part of this partnership some of the objectives outside of sport are to help developing reading, literacy and also speaking the English language. So our students have lead and developed the Reading to you Karu project which involved them trying to meet these objectives. Students collected old books on sport to encourage boys into reading more in the Nigerian school, they created their own nursery rhyme booklets with illustrations for less able students and then recorded the sound of them reading them and gave the school these on CD’s. They then bought some story books including the Road Dahl collection and read extract of the book out and recorded these to make a DVD, so students in Nigeria could read the book and watch the DVD as they did or before and after. In addition they then bought the actual films on DVD of the books so students could watch this after reading the book. The students also purchased a DVD player for the school as they already had a TV. The final part of the project was that students filmed them speaking basic English language and focused on things like phonetics so it could help develop the Nigerian students spoken English but also creating materials that were going to be used to train teachers too.
Just after our guests met the Reading to Karu team they then met a group of students who are trying to introduce traditional Nigerian dancing to our school and the students got a chance to be taught some of the traditional dancing with our Nigerian teachers taking the lead. Have you got any ideas for great international literacy projects? Are you doing anything similar? It would be great to hear what you are doing. The final post Part 4 focuses on the partnership between Cornwall & Nigeria.