We have had our last reading and library lessons for 2021 as many of our little customers have already left for the holidays. So we thought that it would be a good time to reflect on the effects of almost two years COVID measures in our schools.
Whilst everyone has got used to mask wearing, hand washing, sanitising and temperature taking -and can’t deny that we should always have been doing some of this stuff – the biggest and most important effect of COVID has been the massive loss of learning time for most South African learners.
The NIDS-CRAM studies report that as much as a full year of learning has been lost by the majority of South African primary school learners since March 2020 due to school closures and ongoing school rotations. At Cosmo City Primary where we are conducting our pilot study, children attend school 2 days out of a 6-school day rotation to prevent overcrowding in the classrooms. The effect of a little one missing a day of school translates into 1.25 lost learning days and we have noticed a large decrease in the reading scores of the Grade 3 children this year compared to Grade 3 classes we assessed in 2018, before COVID.
But there are some upsides to the COVID regulations. We know that it has been much easier for us to manage the split classes of 20-24 children in the library rather than the usual 50-76 children. Every child has the use of their own tablet and headphones in the library and we’ve had some great, fun times during the year. We’ve also had the benefit of, and enjoyed working with, some young people employed to help improve reading in schools – the government’s “Reading Champions”.
We found the most popular books in the library to be the read-along books for younger children, which makes sense as we decided to work with the foundation phase this year. The most borrowed book of the year was from the World of Reading, “This is Black Panther”, followed quite closely by the World of Reading’s “Spiderman”. In third place for most checkouts was the Nal’ibali story, “Crocodile’s Funeral”. The audio book “Secrets of the Silver Lion” by Emma Otheguy, read by Kyla Garcia was in fourth place for number of checkouts.
We conducted a mini trial of the Book Village app. this year and it was really exciting for us to watch a young learner in Cosmo City enjoying a reading lesson from a tutor in Cape Town. The app is being further developed and we plan to begin our first large-scale trial in the 2nd term of 2022, and we can’t wait!
At the moment there is a lot of uncertainty about the new Omicron COVID variant and we don’t know how this is going to affect schools opening next year. But for now I’d agree with the conclusion of the NIDS-CRAM study that “moving forward school closures should not be an option in the response to COVID -19”.
