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Alpha-Phonics Helps Train Nigerian Children
and AIDS Afflicted Women
The
story of
how the
Volunteers used the materials is extraordinary. The information
accessible
further in
this posting very clearly demonstrates how the work of dedicated
Volunteers with an absolute minimum of resources, but a lot of
ingenuity, has become quite a success story.
 You
can see
here below
a written (Their emails) and photo chronicle of the work, courtesy
various of the Volunteers.
It
all started
with a
long-time promoter of Alpha Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers.
Annette Whittaker who had used it to teach her own son to read
designed the Alpha Phonics charts in Jos in 2010/2011 to teach
illiterate women there who unfortunately had contracted AIDS,
generally through no fault of their own. She taught them gradually
and asked them to go back to their homes, gather children around them
and teach what they had learned. While she was in the process of
making these charts Marlene Wiebe and Adrienne Lillo were introduced
to the concept and thought it could be most helpful to local teachers
in the early primary level.
As
can be seen
in the
photos the Alpha-Phonics materials were put on easel-like large-page
sheets of materials so the lessons could be used to teach an entire
class. We understand this, while taking a lot of painstaking work by
local Volunteers, has been successful.
We
urge you to read
the following emails from the people in Nigeria and to look at the
photos they sent to us at The Paradigm Co. They tell an unforgettable
and touching story.
“Alpha
Phonics lessons on charts”
Alpha-Phonics
Lesson
10 as a chart for students.
As indicated in
the
introduction, Adrienne Lillo and myself, Marlene Wiebe, met Annette
early 2011 and were very excited to see Alpha
phonics: A Primer for
Beginning Readers. Our husbands were
both guest lecturers at teachers
colleges on the Jos Plateau, Nigeria. We had been searching for an
African phonics curriculum in our area on the Jos Plateau for a few
years but without success. When Annette introduced us to Alphabet
Drill Charts, math drill charts, the Alpha Phonics book all with
accompanying charts, all of which she designed, we knew that it could
be revolutionary. I made a set of the alphabet charts while Adrienne
made all of the alphabet drills, math drills and Alpha
Phonics
lessons on charts. I gathered a few key English and math college
lecturers and teachers from a few schools in our Pankshin area (where
our home and work is located) to hear Annette's day presentation and
to make some charts over the next few days. I felt that if lecturers
caught the drill idea and would have all of their students produce
the charts and understand how to use them, it would go a long way in
helping the English and Math teachers in the future.
Workshop
in Pankshin
"the
teacher
standing by the bush....
made the phonics charts for the first 12
lessons...."
At the workshop
Annette was only able to introduce
the Alpha Phonics
lessons on
charts. However, several of the teachers begged me to help them make
some for the beginning primary class. So I had them to my house
several times and we prepared them together. The teacher standing by
the bush in the picture below is one of those teachers that made the
phonics charts for the first 12 lessons to use in her Pre-Primary and
Primary 1 class. She was a very happy lady. She is using the alphabet
drills and phonics lessons in her every-day teaching and is thrilled
with the results. She is in her classroom in second picture drilling
students on 3 alphabet letters.
The
challenge here is actually getting teachers to put all of the drills
and phonics lessons on the charts. It takes many hours and much hard
work! That doesn't happen willingly here in our area anyway. The head
teacher has to require teachers to spend time after school doing such
a project and most schools are already open at 7:30 a.m. and by 1
noon they are so tired from the heat as well. But it could be done
gradually. It would be so wonderful if at least some of the charts
could be produced and laminated by a company - like the nice posters
you buy in America at teacher's stores. But the cost here is
prohibitive, not knowing how many schools would actually spend the
money on these materials. In speaking recently with ACTS (Africa
Christian Textbooks), this may actually come to fruition. The
challenges are numerous. But we keep pushing forward!
Alpha-Phonics
introduced to
Headmaster Hosea
Hosea
and I met through one of his
teachers. He is now 27 years old and headmaster of Firm Foundation
and Dominion Academy in a town just south of Jos. This school has
been set up by a retired Air force staff that was in charge of
education and his specialty is math. When Hosea saw your phonics
curriculum he said, “Ma, this is exactly what we need to teach
children to read.” When I returned to Nigeria beginning of 2012
after some time in Canada, he had been making phonics charts using
some of the lessons modeled by Alpha-Phonics.
And he was delighted with the tools he now had and the learning
taking place by the pupils in his school! He and I discussed how
wonderful it would be to have a similar phonics continuum with
African content. And so the dream began and is in process to this
day.
Hosea
and I have been working on a more detailed phonics project since then.
Most teachers in our area would have no idea what to do with the Alpha-Phonics
material because they’ve not been taught phonics in Primary School
or how to teach phonics at teachers college. To-date we’ve complete
copies of a 20 page teachers’ manual on some of the aspects of
literacy, a section on alphabet letter and sound identification using
the alphabet charts to drill, teacher and pupils materials for two letter
words and three-four letter words. And we’re now preparing further
materials. We’ve titled our material The
Literacy Adventure: Fun in Learning Phonics. What
we’ve done so far is being field-tested in several schools including
Hosea’s and Mary Beth’s. You will read about Mary Beth’s
school below.
Hosea and I working on phonics
curriculum 2012 Hosea and I this past May 2013
"....she
was like a savior...."
Foundation
Academy opened 2011 under the proprietress Mary Beth Oyabade, an
American married to a Nigerian. She and her husband’s organization
majors on helping women with HIV to establish sewing businesses, to
give them medications, and their organization also schools many
orphans. She realized that these women’s children and the orphans
were not learning to read in the public school system and so opened
Foundation Academy for nursery to secondary levels.
Adrienne has volunteered many hours at this
school over the past year. Since she had written all 128 lessons of Alpha-Phonics on charts, she used them together
with the pocket chart she sewed to teach the teachers and pupils. We
are really stressing the opportunity to provide the children with the
opportunity to DO what they are learning. We discovered that the
pupils give better attention as they are checking to see if the
person is giving the correct answer and they are waiting for their
turn. My husband's college has a printing press and so I got very
useful ends of card-stock for a number of schools to use for making
flashcards. This kind of interaction is seldom done in local schools
which focus more on rote learning.
Adrienne
has now made several sets of Alpha-Phonics
charts for the school. The teachers had a `thank you' party for her.
They kept saying that she was like a savior - finally they are
learning how to teach English and they are very happy. They feel
empowered and are rewarded with children learning to read words and
even reading for pleasure! African proverb – if you want to hide
something from an African, hide it in a book! In other words, it is
not a reading culture – but may we help to change that!
Adrienne wanted Hosea to produce a CD giving an
introduction to phonics so that teachers can hear sounds and words
produced by a fellow Nigerian. Hosea and I spent two days in a
sound–proof studio. We are very happy with the resulting CD and so
in the near future want to publish it and the wording with an ISBN
number so that it is not pirated! On it are a few songs for letter
identification and sound identification, words containing each sound
as examples and a brief overview of rules and reading of the
beginning of many of the word lists in Alpha-Phonics.
"more
materials” requested from The
Paradigm Co., Inc.
In
summer 2012 at Hosea’s request, I contacted The Paradigm Co.,
Inc., publishers of Alpha-Phonics
A Primer for Beginning Readers
for more materials. Paradigm sent my order and indicated it would like
to help in any way it could. Hosea was delighted and very grateful for
the additional materials I took when we returned to Nigeria at the beginning
of 2013. He was especially excited to see the Alpha-Phonics
Little Companion Readers.
He said, “Ma, we don’t have any books like this and the
children are begging for books to read.” The challenge with these
readers is that most of the content is not familiar to Nigerian children.
And so, Adrienne and I produced some story books. Adrienne wrote and
beautifully illustrated 7 short story books on the short vowels and
in the next months they are to be published into one book through ACTS.
She plans to continue making books to complement the phonics lessons.
We’ve seen no
such thing as basal readers.
I wrote a counting book for young children and some booklets on the
short vowels using pictures taken from a CD that includes pictures from
about 20 countries around the world. I also incorporated some of the
African pictures into Hosea and my phonics material.
Adrienne’s books.
I hope
this is helpful to give you a good
picture of what we are up to for the love of children and literacy!
It’s been quite an adventure for Adrienne and me, neither of whom
are professional teachers, but rather self- taught. We just enjoy
working together and feel it a privilege to do so!
Marlene
Wiebe
marlenewiebe@sympatico.ca
Email May 2, 2013 - Anne
Lauritzen to alphaphonics@hotmail.com
The Impact of
Alpha-Phonics
at Cornerstone Academy, Nigeria
In 2010 the
teaching in
public schools in Plateau State, Nigeria were affected by several
long strikes. So was the local public school in the village of Gyero
where City Ministries – a ministry working with orphans and
destitute children – has been running an orphanage since 2003. The
more than 100 children would often have days with no teaching except
the extra classes provided by the ministry. The leader of the
orphanage encouraged that the ministry should start its own school
for the children in the ministry. A group consisting of Nigerians and
missionaries took up this task and a committee was formed. As this
happened Annette Whittaker, a long time missionary in Nigeria, moved
to Jos. Annette had earlier started a school in the southern part of
Nigeria using Alpha-Phonics as her main program to teach the children
to read. Annette joined the group and because of the good results she
had had with her students; Alpha-Phonics was chosen for the school in
Gyero as well. Annette had gained permission to hand copy the
Alpha-Phonics book to big sheets of paper and she also ensured that
we had permission to do that in the school in Gyero. The book was
copied to several charts and in September 2010 the school for the
orphans and destitute children started in Gyero, called Cornerstone
Academy. The impact of the teaching has been significant. Most of the
children can now read as they progress from grade 1 to grade 2. In
Nigeria it is not uncommon that children can spend five years in a
public elementary school and leave the school without the ability to
read.
We are happy
that we
are using Alpha-Phonics as our “learning to read” program and we
are happy that it is an efficient, low in cost material as well.
The
teachers will teach one page at a time and after that the students
will repeat that certain page with the rest of the class. It has
really proved itself useful also in an African
context. 
The picture to the
right is from grade 2 and the one on the
left from grade 3.
If
you would like to help Cornerstone Academy
contact: marlenewiebe@sympatico.ca
and
please pray for the safety and success of these
dedicated people in
Nigeria
Finally, please see below the "appeal for help"
for this reading project in Nigeria.
Dear Mr. Watt,*
We’ve been
so encouraged by your interest in what we’re doing in Nigeria, even
to place information on a web-site. Wow! As you see from the above
revision, we are all working with different faith-based organizations
but have banded together. When we meet we encourage each other with
the new materials we have discovered or new ideas for teaching.
As of May, it was decided that schools interested in primary
education would attempt to meet together once a month to learn
new ways of teaching and helping pupils, like professional
development I guess. There were over 100 teachers at that
meeting and Hosea was very excited about this new learning
opportunity and community of serious teachers. I didn’t
attend and so have no pictures.
Adrienne and I
have chosen to work with Nigerians who are serious about education.
I’ve chosen to work with Hosea because he has a keen and
inquisitive mind, loves to read widely, is a good communicator, is on
time for our many sessions and is trustworthy. In March he launched a
book entitled Is
it Lust or Love? The
target audience is young
people.
He did a lot
of reading about phonics on the internet and is determined to
complete our phonics project The
Literacy Adventure: Fun in Learning Phonics.
We’ve used a similar layout of sequence as Alpha-Phonics
but are using fewer word lists in the short vowel section. Before my
husband and I left Nigeria we had a heart to heart talk about our
material. He is getting regular requests from principals and teachers
and even from a local government official for help in teaching
children to learn to read and he is sure that once schools try out
what we’ve done so far and see the results, they will want the rest
of the curriculum when it’s completed.
The day Rudy
and I flew out Adrienne’s husband met with manager Luka Vandi at
ACTS about publishing her story books and Hosea joined them about
publishing some copies of what we’ve done on our phonics curriculum
to-date. There is now a `print on demand’ machine in Jos which ACTS
spoke of using to publish a minimal amount of materials to begin with
to field-test and then they feel there won’t be trouble in selling
our materials. The start-up costs will be a challenge for us but
Hosea and Luka feel that once it gets off the ground, the project
should be self-sustaining. Until now Adrienne and I have personally
funded most of what we’ve been doing including cost of paper, wood
to mount charts, even Hosea’s transport money and cost of producing
the CD. If funding could be raised to help us with the `print on
demand’ on Adrienne’s books and our curriculum, it would be very
much appreciated and monies would be accounted for. We would have to
get a clearer picture from the manager of ACTS as to what the
approximate cost would be. Would you be willing and able to help us
access some funds for this project?
I’d be happy
to send the work we’ve done so far by attachment.
We really
appreciated your prayers while in Jos. We’re very thankful that the
city itself had very little unrest, although there were sporadic
killings in outlying areas and terrible things continue to happen in
in Northern Nigeria.
We appreciate
your time and effort to work along-side us. After all, teamwork is
the best!
Marlene Wiebe
*Publisher of Alpha-Phonics in the USA
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