Student-to-Student Tutoring a Success in Granada
Apr 27th, 2009 by Jon Posted in Nicaragua News | No Comments
It’s not every day you experience one of those profound “aha!” moments - that special moment when a problem’s solution becomes crystal clear. Rarer still is one of those aha! moments where the solution is so perfect it makes you wonder why it wasn’t done sooner.
That was how I felt when I heard about Empowerment International’s Student-to-Student tutoring programme while talking to Kathy Adams (the founder of Empowerment International) over the phone. Empowerment International helps sponsor children to go to school, but they discovered that attending class is sometimes not enough to help them get the help they need. In some cases, the children in grades 1 to 4 were unable to read and write despite receiving education from the public school system.
So what is a child sponsoring non-profit organization to do?
Sure you can spend money and hire tutors to teach the children, or you can do what EI did - ask older students to volunteer and help teach the younger kids. To me, this was the aha! moment - the solution was perfect. While asking the teenagers to volunteer helps save some money, the more valuable benefit is the fact that the teens gain self-esteem and self-worth, and the children in grades 1 to 4 gain the skills they need to master writing and reading.
According to Empowerment International’s recent newsletter:
Catarina, 8, says of her tutor Rosa, “She helps me to learn. I am very happy here because I am learning to read and write better.”
Rosa, 16, grins from ear to ear as she explains, “It just makes me so happy to teach my two students to read, write, add, and multiply. I see them growing every day.”
So far there are 62 children receiving tutoring, and 16 teens being mentors and tutors to them. That’s 78 kids in Granada being impacted and changed for a better tomorrow.
- Young kids get the help they need for school.
- Older kids get valuable life skills and self-esteem.
- Empowerment International gains an effective programme that doesn’t cost a lot to run.
- Everyone wins!
Aha! Perfect!
Learn more about Empowerment International by visiting them here: http://www.empowermentinternational.org/
