Read 4 a Fiver Update

8th June 2024

Thank you so much to everyone who donated to the school to enable us to purchase reading books for the children. Our target was to raise £200, including the gift aid, we raised £228.16 and so we smashed the target! We have sent 20,000GMD to the school to purchase the books locally.

As you know, the roof of the school leaks, and so the volunteers at the school were concerned that the reading books would be ruined during the rainy season. We have therefore set aside the funds to buy the reading books once this is replaced during June 2024.

Because of your generosity we have some funds left over and so we have been able to purchase other items, in addition to the reading books.

We now have workbooks to help the children with Maths and English at levels 1, 2 and 3.

Many of the families of the children cannot afford exercise books, pencils and pencil sharpeners, we have purchased these for every child in the school.

One of the volunteers was telling me about a test that her child took recently. She was talking to the teacher about this, who said that they would have got a higher grade if they had coloured in the Gambian flag. When she asked why they didn’t colour it in, she found out that it was because the whole class was sharing two red, blue and green coloured pencils and they didn’t manage to get one of these during the time allocated for the test. We have used some of the funds to buy packs of coloured pencils so that there are enough for all of the children.

We have also purchased some rubbers, chalk and chalkboard erasers.

Thank you to everyone who donated towards this, we will share some photos of the new reading books once the roof has been replaced.