Public Relations Officer of the Barbados Association of Reading, Cheryl Williams (left), presenting Juliet Gabbidon-King, teacher and reading specialist at the Graydon Sealy Secondary School with books.
Public Relations Officer of the Barbados Association of Reading, Cheryl Williams (left), presenting Shawntelle Scantlebury, teacher of English and Theatre Arts, and reading specialist at the Alleyne Secondary School.
Marcia Cumberbatch, Head of the English Department at the Deighton Griffith Secondary School, being presented with a portion of the donated books.
BAR donates new books
AS a part of their celebration of International Literacy Day, the Barbados Association of Reading (BAR) decided to donate a few books to multiple organisations and schools yesterday morning.
Speaking at the book donation event, which was held at the United Nations House, Cheryl Williams, Public Relations Officer of the Association, explained each school present yesterday morning, would receive 30 books for their respective reading clubs. She revealed that these donations were made possible by their partner, the CODE Foundation in Canada through the Burt Award for Caribbean Literature.
“The CODE NGO is an initiative that looks at global literacy and education. One of the things that they noted is that in the developing world, we need books written for children and young adults in their context. They found it was much easier to help children achieve literacy and love reading when they saw themselves reflected in the books that they read,” she said.
Williams told The Barbados Advocate that they tend to give books to schools, book clubs and reading clubs per their requests. Additionally, she noted that they also gave books to the Summerville and Dodds institutions.
“Now International Literacy Day this year focuses on literacy and technology and earlier this month, we were discussing the whole idea of eBooks in our school system and some of the challenges that come along with using eBooks,” she said.
She expressed that from a teacher’s point of view, there are many challenges as to how that system would work in Barbados. She suggested that instead of trying to buy eBooks to completely replace the textbooks of students, the Government should just look at having a virtual library. She explained that this virtual library would contain over 900 books that would cater specifically to the young children and expressed that the children could pay a small fee to have all the books at their fingertips for the year.
She went on to note that community literacy was a main plank of their organisation and they also did programmes, which parents and grandparents are invited to be a part of, and that train teachers for eight weeks in the literary department and how best to help their students.