Remedial Reading Programme Teacher’s Implementation Guide

The programme focuses on helping learners acquire the specific skills needed to participate and learn concepts and skills required for their grade or level. Learners' participation in the programme comes to an end once they acquire the required skills. Learners who struggle to learn foundational skills will not be able to learn higher-level skills and will continue to fall further and further behind. This phenomenon has been referred to as the Matthew Effect, based on the common saying "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer." Research has shown that learners who fall behind in reading in grade 1 will continue to fall behind. The gap between these learners and learners who are improving at a typical pace will widen as they get older. Learners who do not learn to read will struggle with reading in every subject or learning area. When schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, many learners were not able to access instruction to continue learning in the normal school setup. Various studies and reports show that learners generally experienced at least some learning loss during this period. Learners who were struggling when schools closed experienced the most learning loss. Learners in Grade 3 in the 2022 school year were at the beginning of Grade 1 when schools in Kenya closed. They had fewer weeks of schooling and did not get sufficient time to acquire the necessary skills. Grade 3 learners who are struggling to learn to read in English now will struggle much more in Grade 4 when instruction will be in English, the language for all subjects except languages. The first step in any remedial programme is to decide which learners need extra support. The best way to do this is by giving each learner an assessment that will let the teacher know exactly what learners know and what they might be struggling with. In this programme, two short assessments will be used to determine which learners need the extra support and what groups to place them in. The word reading assessment is a quick check of what learners know about reading and sounding out words. The letter sound assessment is a quick way of understanding what learners have learned about letter sounds. The letter sound assessment will be administered only if learners read less than 14 words correctly on the word reading assessment. The assessment will help the teacher to know how many letter sounds each learner knows and where they may still need some extra support. The programme is designed to help learners who are struggling to learn to read in English, allowing them to be better prepared for Grade 4 instruction and academic work.