Read for the Top

The schools open at the beginning of January and everything is very busy: school selection, scholarship applications, purchasing uniforms.
Read for the Top was born in Victoria by a teacher at an inner city school. Its intention is to encourage reading in primary age children who either do not come from a reading culture, who have few books and other materials available to them, or who learn English as a second language. Often all three are true.
Victoria Rotary Club sponsored Read for the Top in a Victoria school last year and we thought it would be a wonderful thing to bring to Kenya. Children in our rural schools here meet all three of the criteria I listed and are greatly disadvantaged by hearing little English in their environment, yet all school exams are in English. Since a child's future depends on the results of one single examination session, they have little chance of progressing to a secondary school.
Through a Rotary grant we purchased books for Emmaloba Primary and last week I spent a day in the school setting up the programme. The children are in teams and have to read six books--four in English and two in Kiswahili.
In a month or so we will run heats and the final before I leave in March. The school will keep the books and can repeat the programme with another group.
Class six seized on the books and set to reading right away