Education Matters: Nursery & Primary Education Can be Much More than ABC & 123
Education Matters by Rohey L. Ceesay
This is the first in a series of publications by Rohey L. Ceesay who is a teacher that is about to start her third term at Children First Academy. She is a former Head Girl at the Gambia Senior Secondary School in Banjul. Rohey is passionate about alternative education approaches and being open to new ideas in education which she believes can help transform our country.
By Rohey L. Ceesay
Nursery and Primary education can be about so much more than ABC-123. Let's inspire our children!
“As Gambian teachers, our job should not be to just fill our children’s heads with facts learned from a handful of set textbooks, but to inspire the children, to fire their imaginations and make them believe that a Gambian child can do as well, or better, than any kid in Europe or the USA.”
Cuban Ambassador Ruben G Abelenda recently visited the Crab Island Technical and Vocational Education Training Centre, citing the place as an example of an inclusive social project.
The Point newspaper has more details.
The Crab Island centre prepares young men and women for careers in essential practical trades, for example to become electricians, seamstresses and tailors, plumbers, hairdressers, satellite dish installers, builders and farmers.
Vocational training is an essential part of The Gambia's national development, but often our children will go through their entire school life with no career ambitions or opportunities to think about careers beyond the usual handful of teacher/doctor/footballer/tailor/driver/trader options.
How many Gambian children will even know what an astronomer or an astronaut is? Or a marine biologist or a meteorologist, or a geologist or a...
Gambian astronauts? No, not yet, but we must not shackle our children's minds and imaginations. The African Union has a space agency. Many African countries have their own space agencies. South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, Morocco, Ethiopia, Tunisia, Sudan, Rwanda, Kenya, Mauritius, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Angola have all launched satellites into orbit, but how many Gambian children will ever learn about this?
Cote d'Ivoire will launch its first satellite, YAM-SAT CI 01, this year.
Ghana's GhanaSat-1 was launched in 2017. It was developed by students at the All Nations University in Koforidua.
Most schoolchildren in The Gambia will first learn about the solar system in Grade 4. Two pages are devoted to the topic, which do nothing to excite children about the wonders of the universe.
Meanwhile at Children First, our children last term were watching video from the International Space Station, and looking at the latest images of distant galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope.
As Gambian teachers, our job should not be to just fill our children's heads with facts learned from a handful of set textbooks, but to inspire the children, to fire their imaginations and make them believe that a Gambian child can do as well, or better, than any kid in Europe or the USA.
Part of the problem is that the commonly-used basic school curriculum generally does not provide practical or broad experience for younger children - by which I mean Lower Basic and Nursery students - to explore their skills potential and identify wide-ranging interests and aptitudes.
This does not fully meet the requirements of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Articles 28 and 29, with special regard to this sub-section of Article 29:
The education of the child shall be directed to…the development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential.
The Convention was ratified by the Gambian government in 1990, and a lot of progress has since been made in advancing children's rights in The Gambia.
UNICEF Gambia marked the 30th anniversary in 2019. There are some great pictures here.
But we all know children are on the streets selling or begging, or working as unpaid apprentices or kept at home doing domestic chores, when they should be at school. We all know corporal punishment and humiliating punishments are still widely used in Gambian schools, despite MoBSE guidelines to the contrary.
At Children First, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in all its parts is central to our school ethos.
“Our mission is to show that children can and will develop a life-long love of learning by being relaxed, being comfortable and by having as much fun as possible while in school, and by having as wide as possible a range of learning experiences appropriate to their age, aptitude and ability.”
So at Children First our children are introduced to both academic and practical education from Nursery 1, with even our youngest nursery children participating (fully supervised, of course) in practical lessons such as cookery, needlecraft and carpentry.
At our graduation ceremony last July year, we had 6 year olds demonstrating how to cook healthy omelettes. This year our Grade 2 students put on a play for the parents, and cooked Mexican food. For the 2022 graduation, we had six year olds performing an experiment to show the ratio of oxygen and nitrogen in the air. This year our mostly 6 year-old nursery graduates showed how they learned the first twenty elements of the Periodic Table (Grade 7 at regular school) and the names of the bones of the body (Patella, scapula, tarsals, clavicle, etc - learned at Grade 6 in regular school).
In the academic arena, our nursery children learn about practical science and perform simple and safe chemistry, biology and physics experiments as part of their daily nursery education, along with art and crafts, music, dance, singing, gymnastics and of course numeracy and literacy, blended with history and geography, nature studies, etc.
In doing all this, we open the child's mind to a world of career choices in later years that many might otherwise never consider. And more importantly still we help each child identify their individual learning strengths and weaknesses, so they can make informed decisions about what potential career options are realistic for them.
Here in The Gambia this approach seems largely unknown. Here, the “factory model” reigns supreme. Box-shaped classrooms with rows of children sat at desks facing the teacher, who controls the class at every level, usually following a rigid fixed curriculum where a handful of subjects and topics are taught at the same time each day in the same way in each school, to a class of children roughly the same age but that may vary wildly in ability and aptitude.
We are not there yet, but at Children First we are slowly evolving our class environments to reflect the best of European and North American classroom theory, that include few or no desks, comfortable furnishings, and treating children like human beings. If children are relaxed and comfortable they learn so much more effectively.
Not all schools have adopted the desk-free approach, but those that have say they see a 60% increase in productivity.
And outdoor classrooms similarly see children outperform their classmates inside a regular classroom.
The factory model education system is designed to get as many children as possible to a minimum level each year, across a fixed number of disciplines, as pre-determined by the curriculum.
The problem being, less-able children or late-developers get left behind, while the more able are held back. That's especially so here in The Gambia where classes of 50-60 children with one teacher are not unusual, making it impractical to work the children in smaller groups within the class, each group working at their own pace.
At Children First each class is divided into four groups - Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium and Beryllium - each group working at a different level according to ability and aptitude.
The group names reflect the science-based approach of Children First, but we are not a science school. We cover everything we can, from English and maths to geography and history, French, nature studies, arts and crafts, you name it.
Rather, what makes us a science-based school is that all our approaches to education are informed by the latest scientific research into pedagogy and how children learn.
But of course, the children learning about science is a big part of that approach.
For many primary schools, the only science the children will learn is what little is referenced in the Integrated Studies textbooks.
But taking the Grade 4 Integrated Studies book as an example, there are less than thirty pages on science, for the entire year. The books are well written (if outdated - Pluto is no longer classed as a planet) and beautifully illustrated, but if this is the only science primary school children will learn about, where will our future scientists come from?
“Upper basic textbooks are dreadfully dull and uninspiring, and as the children move to secondary education the focus is all about passing G9 and G12 exams. The joy of learning takes second place to passing the test. Is it any wonder most Gambians will never pick up a book once they leave school?”
This is the factory model in action, and while it's widely used around the world, including in the developed countries, its aim is to ensure a future workforce of school-leavers with a minimum standard of education.
But in developed countries the private education sector ensures that, alongside this, at least some children are given the opportunity to move forward faster, to reach their true potential. And it is this that separates the developed from the developing world.
In The Gambia, the private education sector is nearly all exam-focussed, and at the high end, of course, the focus is on the Cambridge international exams, but access to these private schools comes at a price most Gambians cannot afford.
But even in the better private schools, the prevalent approach is that children of a certain age do certain things. When you are three years old you learn phonics sounds and numbers and nursery rhymes. Two letter words when you are four years old. A child will not learn about the solar system until they are in Grade 4, the human skeleton until they are in Grade 6, and the Periodical Table will have to wait until they are in Grade 7.
Yet in the developed world, many (not all) children are learning about chemistry and biology and space at three years old.
Home educators and private schools will have use of educational toys like this - a working chemistry set for three year olds. Or what we Gambians call Nursery 1.
Or this working telescope, capable of viewing the craters on the Moon, the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter, that is marketed for 4 year olds.
Of course, we don't have those resources readily available to us here in The Gambia, but that needn't hold us back.
At Children First our objective is to show not only that a Gambian child can do as well as any child in Europe or the USA, but that it can be done in The Gambia with our locally available resources.
Consequently, we have a clear policy of not importing educational resources like these, that it would be unrealistic for other Gambian schools to match. Instead we improvise and make use only of materials and resources that are, or can be, readily available to schools here. And we create and develop our own resources, which we are happy to share with other schools.
A good example is our Get Gambia Reading series of books, which are written specifically for Gambian children, and which are simply designed such that they can be printed off on any home printer system.
At Children First we don't use the discredited Jolly Phonics reading system, and only use phonics as an aid to spelling. For reading, we use a science-based balanced read-first-phonics-later key-words methodology that ensures every child not only can read, but that they enjoy reading.
We also create our own non-fiction texts to introduce to and get our nursery and early primary students excited about topics they won't otherwise encounter at school for many years, or maybe not at all.
Some Gambian teachers protest that what we are doing is "age-inappropriate" and "overloading" the child, but that's just nonsense.
Overloading? Our school day is just three (3) hours long, including two half-hour breaks. You won't find a more relaxed school than Children First.
Age-inappropriate? There is no law in pedagogy that says children have to be a certain age to learn something. This is an artificial construct of a factory-education system, that suppresses the natural learning instincts of young children and makes education a chore.
It would be great to have resources like this 3D plant cell for 7 year-olds, available in the USA and Europe, that young children can take apart to understand how a cell functions.
Or to have available the resources of the prestigious American Chemical Society, which provides Periodic Table resources for children as young as six.
It does so to meet demand from parents, schools and accelerated-learning programmes working with higher-achieving children.
Twenty-first century education means teaching children according to their aptitude and ability, not their age.
So at Children First, our weekly discussion worksheets help the Grade 1 and Grade 2 children broaden their reading skills and their vocabulary while exciting the children about the world - and the universe - around them.
And we always keep things child-centric, and show examples of children around the world doing amazing things, to inspire our own children to reach their potential.
As a teacher, I'm just about to start my third term at the Children First Academy, but as a former Head Girl at the Gambia Senior Secondary School in Banjul, I can safely say that as a country we have a lot to learn about alternative approaches to education and how being open to new ideas in education can help transform our country.
And first and foremost is that nursery and primary education in The Gambia can be about so much more than just ABC-123.
