JahadAbad Children’s Step Towards Knowledge

A Report of the Improvement of Out-of-school JahadAbad Children

Date: March 2019

It’s only been a few months since JahadAbad children entered the classroom and now they are full-fledged students!

JahadAbad is a village in the marginal parts of Sarawan, Sistan and Balouchestan Province which is home to many immigrant children without birth certificates. They have been denied of having an identity and hence, have not been able to sign up in school. Along with the cooperation of the Education Office of Sarawan, “Read with Me” volunteers were able to provide a first-grade classroom for 30 out-of-school children. These children were taught through the Basic Literacy Improvement Packages of Read with Me. Alongside this action, other classrooms have also been established for 80 preschool children in JahadAbad.

These children can now make simple words and sentences with the phonemes they have learned, they follow the stories of Nokhodi, the main character of the Learning Farsi packages and impatiently await learning new phonemes.

Learning each phoneme starts with reading a story from “Learning Farsi with Nokhodi” and then children learn to sing the song of that phoneme. Afterwards, they practice with the workbook to evaluate their new learnings. They feel proud of themselves for being able to read and write small sentences and for completing their workbooks with such ease…

They adore Nokhodi, and count him as one of their friends and classmates! They summarize his stories and perform some as plays.

For teaching them mathematics, we use the “Learning Numeracy Skills with Louloupi” packages. Louloupi has been such an interesting character to them. They can’t wait to know what will happen to Louloupi and his friends and finally see what he looks like or what language he speaks. They even try to imitate the way Louloupi speaks!

They have been learning mathematical concepts faster than Farsi. Up until now, they’ve learned adding and subtracting single digit numbers, their place value, concepts such as equal, greater than and less than. They easily complete patterns and I’m confident to say that we don’t have any weak students in math.