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Diakaridia Diarra is a 2nd grade teacher at the Fadjiguila Community School (Banconi District Education Office) that is situated on the outskirts of Bamako.
He was faced with a common problem faced by others in the field of Language and Communication – he would mix up writing and penmanship.
Mr. Diarra regrets moments when his students copied instead of wrote texts:
“I did not know when to read or write. I struggled to get my students to read. I was using memorization techniques to get them to read and they struggled to read backwards and read words randomly. I had no idea that a Grade 2 student could write his or her thoughts. It was unbelievable at the time to think that a Grade I student could share his or her opinions.”
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The Fadjiguila community school – one of the ten schools that Education Development Center (EDC) studied in 2013 – was included in the USAID/Mali SIRA project. Activities started in 2017 with the training of teachers on various techniques of the balanced literacy and decodable words approach, the provision of teaching materials and the monitoring of classroom facilitation techniques.
This support greatly benefitted Mr. Diakaridia Diarra, whose students began to read with precision and clarity: “Teaching Grade I has never been easier than with SIRA. I get my students to read and write just by applying the techniques and strategies I learned during the training. The Balanced Literacy Approach convinced me that second grade students can actually write. They understand what they read and can interpret it or anticipate what happens next in the text. This is true for both oral and written stories.”
According to Mr. Mamadou Tounkara (School Director), SIRA has enabled grade 1 and 2 teachers to get more than 90% of students to read and write: “When I saw the results obtained through SIRA, I thought of training all my teachers so that they understand these strategies. We have to believe in this approach because I think it can change the situation and yield improved results with regards to reading and writing which is the foundation of everything”.
Launched in 2016 for 5 years, the USAID/Mali SIRA project’s goal is to improve reading outcomes for Malian students in Grades 1 and 2 in public and community schools in the regions of Koulikoro, Ségou, Sikasso and the District of Bamako. https://www.edc.org/selective-integrated-reading-activity-sira
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