Spelling Bee goes local; Dagbani is just a start

Seventy-seven school children, aged between 6 and 10 years will be participating in a pilot spelling competition in their mother tongue, Dagbani. They emerged finalists from a pool of 400 pupils who started the spelling competition.

The children, who are from 20 schools in Yendi, Northern Region, are part of the USAID partnership for Education - Learning.

The Learning project is designed to support the Ministry of Education’s primary school child literacy improvement plans and is USAID’s flagship activity that supports Ghana’s education sector, aims to improve, expand and sustain reading performance for primary school learners nationwide, with a special focus on early grade pupils.

Learning is expected to bolster the human and institutional capacity of Ghana’s education sector by improving teaching excellence in early grade reading, supporting education systems to sustain reading outcomes and engaging communities and parents to promote reading.

The Learning activity has developed a systematic, phonics-based reading programme with materials for primary grade, P1 in what is now referred to as the Dagbani Prototype.

The Dagbani Prototype was launched in January 2017, after which Dagbani language experts developed a P1 Teacher’s Guide and Pupil book based on a systematic introduction of letters and syllables in the Dagbani language.

In order to ensure that pupils find the lessons in the Prototype exciting, USAID/Fhi360/Ghana Education Service has partnered Young Educators Foundation- organisers of The Spelling Bee in Ghana- to design a spelling competition purely in Dagbani.

In the said competition, Dagbani language experts, together with Curriculum Leads of GES in Yendi received training in the rudiments of spelling. This training gave them the needed skills and information to prepare the 400 students for the competition dubbed, The Spelling Bee in Dagbani.

On Tuesday, July 25th, The Spelling Bee in Dagbani will climax the Dagbani Prototype in Yendi; the best-performing pupils will receive rewards of hampers, stationery kits and certificates of participation.