–plans in place to host reading clinic on April 23

THE Ministry of Education, through its recently created literacy department, will be hosting a reading clinic at the New Central High School, on April 23.
The aim of the exercise is to test the literacy skills of students ahead of the full reopening of schools on April 25.
The event, which will run from 10:00hrs to 16:00hrs, is also part of the celebration of International Book Day, which is on April 23.
This initiative will be targetting students from 13 schools located in the Werk-en-Rust area. However, students from any area could participate in the activity.
“The learners will come out and we will have reading assessments done so as to give an understanding of the literacy level. Each learner that comes through the clinic will get a literacy certificate to say what the child’s profile looks like,” Assistant Chief Education Officer (Literacy), Samantha Williams, said during an interview with the Guyana Chronicle.
Persons will be assessed in the areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. The results of this assessment will then be used to guide teachers on how to work with the students going forward.
“The next step would be for us to continue to work with the schools in the community to build teachers’ capacity so that they are able to assist those children whose levels are below their chronological age,” Williams said.
This reading clinic is just the beginning of several other such clinics that will be held all across the country, as the Education Ministry continues to place emphasis on addressing the learning loss caused by COVID-19.
“We have to have our learners become fluent readers, and to ensure they have basic literacy skills to navigate to society,” Williams posited.

Like every country across the world, Guyana is preparing to deal with the after-effects of learning losses which were created by school closures that started since early 2020, due to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though it will be starting in the Werk-en-Rust community, where the literacy department is located, there are plans to gradually have reading clinics held all across the country to have all learners assessed.
“We are doing it in this community first and then we will head into all the different communities and across the country. The next area we are going to target is the Houston-Agricola area. We will go to the schools in that area and then continue to build out. So it is going to be ongoing,” Williams said.
Williams further related that the assessment is also about helping parents and community stakeholders who would also be working along with students.
“While we work on the school’s front we cannot do this alone. [The learners] have been out of school for two years and the deficit will be tremendous, so we will need everybody on board, even the wider community. We are even looking to establish links with persons in the community who offer lessons to the children and we will support them too,” Williams said.
She added: “We have started collecting some data on all the reading corners or literacy programmes in the neighborhoods and will be working with the volunteers in those programmes to train them so they would know how to provide the help that the children need.”
Williams said that the Education Ministry is working aggressively to build awareness and ensure that wider stakeholder groups, including parents and members of the community, understand the importance of literacy, and work along with the ministry to address deficiencies wherever they exist.
“We need them to work as aggressively with us to ensure our learners, who have this huge reading deficit, get to a place where they can become fluent readers. The objective is to really recover from the reading deficits that would have taken place as a result of being away from school for two years, and to ensure that, as a ministry, we are collaborating with everyone because this challenge cannot be fixed by ourselves,” Williams said.