ALOA Schools

Last week was incredibly busy as Moses and I collected data from four of the schools in our ALOA sectors.

The collection went relatively smoothly and it was certainly an interesting exercise. During the week, we assessed 60 children and I found it interesting to see how different their responses were to English children. For example, when asked reading comprehension questions, most of the children who did not know the answer would reply with a word from the excerpt, clearly trying to second-guess an answer, in contrast to children in the UK who would probably remain silent or say "I don't know". It also entertained me when many of the children answered the question "What hit Senga on the head?" with the answer "sister" instead of the correct answer, "rain". I am fairly sure they gave this answer because the story talks about Senga's family, not because they think sisters normally hit their siblings over the head!?!  I also discovered that most of the children could read nonsense words just as well as real words. I suppose they were sounding them all out and probably didn't comprehend the meaning of many of the real words, so this, sadly, would explain the lack of significant difference here.

On Wednesday, we visited the school which is in our comparative sector, a place where we do not provide any support but still collect data so that we can compare it to the data in the sectors where our intervention takes place. I found it hard to be at this school because the teachers and children were really eager to see, and work with, us and I had to confess that we would only visit again when it came to collecting more data. It then took us 4 hours to get home from this school, which is supposed to be an hour and a half on moto. But 10 minutes into the journey, the rain came down in torrents and we had to seek shelter next to a building. Thankfully, a door quickly opened and we were beckoned into a shop where we were able to dry out, buy tea and seat for an hour and a half until the rain stopped and we could continue our journey. I never knew rain could be so painful!

I took a few photos at the schools during the week, and here you can see the contrast between a classroom where we provide intervention, and one that doesn't get support from VSO: