Books for children seem to be taken for granted in the United States. Every family has some. They may be thrown in a toy box, stored on a shelf, or in the back seat of the car. Everyone seems to have a book. But in Guatemala, almost all of the indigenous people are suffering the process of poverty and books are just not part of the culture. There are so few books even published in Guatemala. Because of that, when a school has books, their instinct is to lock them up.
There are books in a small library at the school which were carried down by volunteers over the years. The children are able to access the library for 30 minutes a week. However, they are still not allowed to check out books. With few text books, the only real printed words the children read are from that precious thirty minutes a week in the library. Printed handouts in the classroom, and occasional classroom posters or newspapers just don't help a child learn as well as a good book. Fuency, comprehension, spelling, and writing cannot help be affected by the lack of the printed word in the school.
Because of this and our opportunity to locate closeout books in Spanish, we began hauling books to Guatemala in our luggage. I have given them directly to the teachers for their classrooms. This has given the teachers the opportunity to let the children read the books when they have idle time. The "big books", which are oversized children's literature books, first caught the eye of most of the teachers. Over the years I have also seen the teachers use the leveled readers I have brought to form reading groups and have gotten the children used to presenting oral book reports.
Many of the teachers have allowed the students to take the books home overnight to read to their brothers and sisters. I have heard that a lot of the grandparents in the homes have enjoyed listening to the stories too. An amazing number of them were not able to learn to read when they were young.
The teachers have expressed the need for teaching techniques to be used with the books too. Thanks to my Windows translator, I have been able to recently start taking them directions for using leveled readers, decodable books, reader's theater, dictating stories for the emergent readers, and many more.
If education is the best route out of extreme poverty, then classroom libraries have to be the "on-ramp" in San Lucas. That's why we keep stuffing our checked luggage with books, stuffing our carry-on rolling bags with books, and pairing down what we will use for a week in Guatemala to fit in a back-pack a piece. How can we not?
No comments:
Post a Comment