Press Release 14 October 2004.
Breakthrough in Literacy
The King’s School West Rand, was the setting for a bold and brave experiment. The principal, Annamarie Russell challenged The Brain Food Company (BFC) to prove to her that their Literacy Programmes could deliver the kind of results they laid claim to. Teaching children to read simple books in less than 40 hours of tuition was a bit too much for any principal to swallow. So when The Brain Food Company offered to prove to her that their programmes can achieve this in 4 weeks, she volunteered her school to host this event.
In South Africa, most children only learn to read by the age of 7, towards the end of grade 1. “This is almost too late” says Vivianne Downing. Vivianne is an educator, a director of BFC and the principle developer of the Adventure Phonics and Sound Detectives literacy programmes. “Most of the cognitive learning and development in children takes place between the ages of 1 and 7” she says. “ If you miss this window of opportunity, you do the children a great injustice.” She adds that, the sooner they learn to read, the sooner their hunger for knowledge is stimulated. “Once children can read, they just suck up information from everywhere…they try to read every sign.”
Vivianne has trained children as young as 3 to read using these programmes. Most of the parents get their first surprise, after about 3 weeks of using the programme, when their children start reading road signs while riding in the car with mom. “This is one of the most common reactions from parents” says Vivianne. “They cannot believe it.”
The literacy experiment at King’s School started on the 12th of August 2004. Twelve children from Grade R, who could not read and did not know the alphabet, were chosen. Vivianne Downing spent about 30 minutes per day with the children using the programmes. Various neutral observers were invited to verify the validity and results. Representatives from SAQA, GDE, SABC TV, SABC Radio, Fair Lady Magazine, Living and Loving magazine, Vroue Keur, The Teacher and various others were present for the start and for the end. The whole 4-week process was captured on video in weekly progress reports. This is what the outcome was.
By day 7 – all the children knew the sounds of the alphabet and could name the letters in a random test.
Day 14 – all the children could sound out and read 3-letter words.
By day 21 – all the children could read 4 and 5-letter words.
By day 28 – most of the children could read a simple READER book for beginners.
“The results are almost unbelievable” said Annamarie Russell, principal of Kings School. “It took us a total of about 10 hours of tuition at school, with some homework, to get these children to read. It normally takes 6-8 months to achieve these results. The literacy programmes are so easy to use, every teacher now wants her own set in class.”
These programmes break away from conventional teaching and it all happens while playing simple card games and board games. The results are so amazing, because the programmes are so easy to use. There is no actual teaching. The teacher or parent simply facilitates the games and guides the learners. All the “learning stuff” is cleverly hidden and disguised in each game. The games are progressive and the one follows the other in small increments, so that the learners don’t even realise it.
“This is not rocket science” says Vivianne. “That is why children learn so quickly. Not for ONE moment do they think they are going to learn something when you open the box” she adds. “It’s so colourful, fun, and looks like a big game. They don’t want to stop playing once they start.”
The Brain Food Company developed these programmes over a period of 3-4 years, doing trials with children and adults. The remarkable thing is that the results with adults are almost as impressive. “Most adults involved in our pilot projects learnt basic literacy skills in 4-8 weeks” says Vivianne Downing.
This is in stark contrast with ABET, where it takes 8-12 months to achieve similar results.
The beauty of the outcome with these programmes is that the learners truly understand how to break down words, how to sound them out and how to string them together into a sentence. There is no “parrot fashion” learning. This is a life skill which the learners will never forget.
The programmes have been endorsed by Gauteng Dept. of Education and a statement supporting the results has been made by SAQA (South African Qualifications Authority) and Proudly South African during October 2004.
End.
