By Hindaty Traore, Girls’ Project Manager
Mali Rising’s Girls’ Project is focused on helping girls get into school and succeed there. One key to success in school? Reading abilities! That’s where our Great Girls Read sessions come into play.
Girls read Great Girls Read texts together during monthly reading sessions designed to jumpstart their skills but also to inspire a life-long love of reading.
Great Girls Read reading sessions are designed to help the girls improve their reading skills and find real pleasure in reading. Each month, I share specially crafted, fun texts with the girls. These attractive stories encourage the exploration and engagement of young girls in reading books and stories. As a group, we work on reading the texts and developing their reading skills. Then, the girls take home fun homework assignments to keep them practicing between sessions.
The benefits of our reading sessions are numerous. First, the reading sessions provide good, basic reading support that many girls missed out on in earlier grades. The sessions also develop their vocabulary and their oral and written expression skills. Lastly, the stories and discussions help the girls explore ideas and people through the narratives that they might otherwise never be exposed to!
Adiaratou S. represents just how useful these sessions are to participants. Adiaratou is 16 years old and in the 9th grade at Judge Memorial Middle School. Adiaratou never used to read for fun. Now she says, thanks to our reading sessions, she spends 30 minutes every day reading to be able to improve her reading.
This reading time allowed her to differentiate punctuation and enrich her vocabulary. “I have benefited greatly from our reading sessions. Reading has helped me improve essential reading skills, such as decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension.”
Adiaratou continued, “Reading encouraged me to develop my curiosity and imagination. I really like the beautiful stories in the texts created by Girls’ Project. I always look forward to discovering them every month.”
Nana is only in 3rd grade but she already loves reading and understands it is a way to expand her world and her future.
A second example of the impact of Great Girls Read comes from Nana D. -- a 9-year-old third grader at Ben Dixon Elementary School. Nana wanted to join the Girls’ Project because she really wanted to participate in our reading sessions.
Nana told me, “I am very happy to be with the girls of the Girls’ Project. This allowed me not only to have fun but also to know how to read because I really like reading. Last year I was in the 2nd grade so I couldn't join the meetings. I still stood at the window to observe the meeting. This gave me more courage to study so I could join the Girls’ Project.”
“My dream is to become a teacher or a doctor. I’d like to be a teacher to educate all the children in my village or a doctor to treat the children, because children are tomorrow’s future,” Nana shared.
In my opinion, reading also offers children the opportunity to enter a fascinating fantasy world where they can grow as a person. This is so important during the period when a child develops all her attentional skills and is critical to a good foundation for success at school.
