The Korando Education Center provides access to education to more than 300 learners. It has been built based on donation since the foundation of Better Me back in 2014 and it has grown since. A number of learners has successfully completed the stage of secondary school and was sent to high school. What a success. And it never stops since there are more and more learners we want to support for a brighter future. And it starts with the basics.

There’s a school break in December and early January. In Kenya, a school year starts by the second week in January and ends latest in November once the exams have been completed for the respective grade. Since I have arrived in December, we have used the time to enable some of the children to catch up with the rest of their class as they did have some struggles to follow the group. In particular the alphabet was an important topic.

The first sessions were dedicated to the alphabet. We went through it again and again and students have improved their skills. It was a bit of challenge and improvisation to use a piece of styrofoam for a background to display a very useful YouTube video which we have used for a while. Children got amazed about it and were kinda yelling the alphabet eventually. That was so nice. And their improvement was so visible. That was motivation enough to continue with the extra classes.

It wasn’t really easy in the beginning because the use of a projector turned out to be a challenge. There was no white blanket around, to bring the moving picture to the wall. The blackboard itself did not work and all I could find was a piece of styrofoam. But even this did only half the job due to the bright daylight. However, it did not stop us from learning, instead we used the computer only. Given the fact that those children don’t have much access to a computer it was even amazing to watch the tutorial videos on the computer.

For a later use I have brought schoolbooks for English classes from home and I was even able to find more useful books in local stores. All this is very helpful for our English classes, to develop small courses for the 17 children, including mini exams for review their individual development. The results gave us an overview about the children’s abilities and gaps where existing. It was helpful to plan the next sessions.

The next step was to learn or to refresh some basic vocabulary such as numbers, fruits, animals, colours etc.; children were supposed to pronounce, spell and to write down the newly learned word onto the whiteboard. Usually the one who managed to name it. But all of them shall have a chance for the sake of equality and fair play. Also, because a good performance led to a sweet reward to keep up the good motivation.

Of course we also did some mini exams just to see how it works out at the end of the day. Children were happy about it but – since this is not a serious class and there’s less pressure – some tried to cheat. This was the beginning to introduce some sweet rewards such as lollipops, candies or chewing gums. Unfortunately, none of these things is something that they can have regularly due the budget priorities. Those who have behaved well and/or have showed a good overall performance during the class were rewarded. Those who have cheated were not retarded but instead the misdemeanour was explained to them. Eventually, it was part of the deal that the children receive some smaller sweets for their good performance, behaviour and good results for the mini exams. This was another motivation to stick with the class. As a result, they kept asking me at least every 2nd day for English class. For several reasons I guess (and hope). That was sweet. 🥰

Another thing that I have tried is to create simple crosswords. Just to keep the class interesting by adding some variety. That has worked too. It has turned out for whom it was easier and who still had some struggles however this was also a good opportunity for the children to deal with fair play and to improve social skills where needed, since we wanted to be on the same skill level at the end of each day. And we were close each time.

It does not necessarily mean that the children had to improve their social skills since those are well developed for their age (from what I could see so far). However, those being slightly impatient, we as a group had to let them wait patiently for the others. Nice side effect to see that it has worked. Still, these are children and this wasn’t a serious class. Despite all respect some of the children left and returned once they have finished. 😁