Literacy toolkit benefits 4,000 ethnic minority children

Hanoi (VNA) - At least 4,000 ethnic minority children aged three to six have benefited from the pilot of the Emergent Literacy and Math (ELM) toolkit to build foundational reading and math skills.

In addition, the capacity of 2,200 teachers and caregivers have been enhanced to support children in building early foundational skills to better equip them to enter the first grade.

These are some of the achievements of the ELM toolkit announced at a conference in Hanoi on June 14.

Hoang Duc Minh, Director of the Agency of Teacher and Education Administrators, said the ELM toolkit has proven effective throughout its three-year pilot programme. This is a useful toolkit to support teachers in their execution of the early childhood education programme, he added.

An assessment of the toolkit’s three-year pilot using the method of International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) has shown a considerable improvement in the IDELA scores in all domains of the benefitted children. Motion skills increased from 44 to 56 percent, early literacy skills from 21 to 37 percent, early math skills from 38 to 50 percent and socio-emotional development from 27 to 32 percent.

The ELM toolkit is one of the key activities of the project, “Emergent literacy and math skills in early childhood development,” in Van Chan district of northern Yen Bai province, and Tay Giang district of central Quang Nam province, from 2015 to 2018. The project has received a grant of 725,300 USD.

The project’s overall objective is to improve school readiness and inclusive development of targeted ethnic minority children, including H’Mong, Dao, Thai and Co Tu children.

There are three main components of the project: improving the learning environment in pre-schools, improving the learning environment at home and advocating recognition of the ELM approach by the Ministry of Education and Training.-VNA