Students in Peru suffer from low reading levels. Covid-19 is made it worse.
When it comes to reading literacy, students in Peru rank among the lowest – according to the 2018 PISA assessment. Main barriers towards high-quality education are poor infrastructure, inadequate learning materials, and out-dated curriculum.
The Covid-19 education crisis has made the situation worse. Nationwide, more than 2.5 million households with school-aged children are without access to computers and the internet – this makes it very hard for students to keep learning.
Crecelee supports children’s learning at home and in schools.
While many households don’t have computers, they do have cell phones. In fact, research shows that over 90% of households with students have cell phones.
Through the CreceLee project in Peru, Worldreader is bringing our digital library to students via cell phones in the home and tablets in the classroom.
The project has been designed to achieve the following goals:
- Increased reading comprehension
- Increased reading levels
- Increased time spent among parents and children reading together
Our library brings age-appropriate, curricularly-aligned Spanish titles to children.
Our library holds over 150 primary-aged student titles in Spanish (supported by an embedded and age-appropriate Spanish Dictionary for students 6 – 12), arranged by grade level and subject.
The collection is composed of authors from Peru (68%), Latin America (17%) and Spain (15%). We aligned these titles with a number of the 29 focus competencies of Peru’s National Curriculum ranging from socio-emotional learning to working in teams, citizenship, environment and diversity and inclusion.
We were helping children keep reading during Covid-19.
With schools closed in Peru due to the pandemic, students were facing the challenge of learning from home.
To help children keep reading across the country we partnered with the Peruvian Ministry of Education, World Vision, and Empresarios por la Educación of Peru. So far we’ve reached over 16,000 new readers as part of the project.
We are supporting the Ministry of Education’s distance learning initiative.
With the onset of Covid-19, the Peruvian Ministry of Education launched a distance learning initiative called “Aprendo en Casa” (learn at home). The online learning platform provides daily lesson plans and accompanying resources to support continued learning of students in Peru from pre-primary through secondary school.
To support this initiative, Worldreader has provided 100 Spanish books through the Aprendo en Casa site available for free on the BookSmart application at bebooksmart.org.
Looking to the future.
As we look to a future beyond Covid-19, our hope is that this new era of distance learning will continue to unveil the potential for mobile phones to access learning in the home. We will continue to work with the Ministry of Education to provide students with on-site support in schools and support at the home level.
We believe solutions like ours will reduce the inequalities in the education system, helping to reduce poverty in the country.
A special thanks.
With special thanks to the Kaphan Foundation for their generous support of CreceLee.
And gratitude to Hand of God Wines for supporting the launch event for the project.
You can sponsor the CreceLee project
We are looking for visionary donors who believe in the promise of technology to transform education across the world. Your donation today will help us bring CreceLee to more schools.
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You can bring CreceLee to your school
Interested in bringing the CreceLee project to your own school? Get in touch with us to learn more about how you can do that.
Contact us at info@worldreader.org
Learn more about CreceLee
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