Students see big boost in reading at CLBL literary summer camp

While most students were happy for the summer holidays, to get a break from classes, 15-year-old Taneisha Nannan was trying to convince her aunt, Tashika Campbell, to allow her to participate in a literary summer camp at her school.

The third-form Kingston High School student told The Gleaner that she always struggled with reading and saw the four-week camp, hosted jointly by the Ministry of Education and Youth and the Creative Language-Based Learning (CLBL) Foundation, as a way to improve.

“I thought of how my aunt struggled with me a bunch of times, and I thought maybe this could change something, so I decided to give it a try,” she said.

Nannan’s enthusiasm pleased her aunt who enrolled her in the programme. It was a decision that both were happy they made.

“Now, when I look in some of my books, I can see the words much more clearly, some of the words that I couldn’t sound out before are picturing in my mind right now,” Nannan said. “I struggled with E A,D, and B a bunch of times. Now that I know the vowels and how to tell the difference, and so on, I think I got pretty much the hang of it.”

At the closing session of the camp at the school on Wednesday, Campbell shared that her niece was already showing the results.

“She brought home the paper (about the closing session) and something that she never normally do …, just to read straight, she did that! I started to applaud her and commend her because I know that she likes that,” she said.

“So yesterday, when she bring home the letter to state that I should come here for the parents’ creative tips, I knew already because of the information that was passed to us as parents. When she read it I said, ‘Okay, it’s working’.”

Althea Bennett’s 11-year-old granddaughter, who she said was reading below her level, also participated in the camp and shared a similar story of improvement.

“You give her something to read, she nah stutter, she just start read it. She believe inna harself,” she said.

Stories like these are why executive director of CLBL Mandy Melvin said the work of her foundation is significant. The camps started in 2017 in Kingston but have now expanded to 13 parishes and give students remedial jumpstarts in reading, spelling, comprehension, and critical thinking to improve their academic performance. This summer, she said, more than 270 students have been impacted.

Focus on teachers

She said her foundation is grounded in the Lindamood-Bell methodologies, which uses programmes focused on the sensory-cognitive processing necessary for reading and comprehension. Since its inception, it has trained 343 teachers, with approximately 270 actively participating in the school system.

“Our main focus is the teacher. The better the teacher, the better result we’re going to have for the children. So we give them 80 hours of instruction, and this really [pushes] them to new heights,” she said.

Melvin’s aspiration is to see these methodologies incorporated fully into the education system.

“We need to expose the teachers through the teaching colleges and the teachers who are already in service to methods that they can use to work with our students so that we can close the reading gap, we can close the comprehension gap and the numeracy gap,” she said.

She added that the training for teachers and the camps are free of cost because of the contribution of its donors such as the European Union.

“As far as the European countries that I represent are concerned, we’re very proud that we can contribute this little tiny support to something as important as this,” EU Ambassador Marianne Van Steen said.

sashana.small@gleanerjm.com