category
Education & Research
address
Cosmo City, Roodepoort, 2188, South Africa
We help children learn to read by digitally connecting them to volunteer tutors and books.
How can you help?
More about Book Village NPC
South Africa has a reading crisis with 82% of South African children unable to read for meaning by the end of Grade 4. One of the reasons is that there is a distressing lack of human connection in the learning to read process. Classes are overcrowded making individual attention at school impossible, and for many children there is nobody to listen to them read at home. Book Village NPC has developed an app that connects children during school hours to volunteer tutors (from anywhere in the world) and a levelled reading series, so that every child might have individual help to learn to read at their own level and pace. We partnered with Oxford University Press for their reading books (the AWEH! series) which are the perfect fit for our app as they are written for South African children. Each reading session is a maximum of 20 minutes to accommodate for children's short attention spans, and time limitations for our volunteers. Volunteers are not required to do a minimum or maximum amount of sessions - we want our volunteers to enjoy each session that they can do and not feel pressured to give time if they don't have it. Our learners absolutely love their reading sessions and it is the highlight of their day (for many of our volunteers as well). We'd love to have you as part of the Book Village community!
