HÀ NỘI — At least 4,000 ethnic minority children aged three to six have benefited from the pilot of the Emergent Literacy and Math (ELM) toolkit to build foundational reading and math skills.

In addition to this, the capacity of 2,200 teachers and caregivers have been enhanced to support children in building early foundational skills to better equip them to enter Class 1.

These are some of the achievements of the ELM toolkit announced at a conference in Hà Nội on Thursday.

Hoàng Đức Minh, director of the Agency of Teacher and Education Administrators, said, “The ELM toolkit has proven effective throughout its three-year pilot programme. This is a useful toolkit to support teachers in their execution of the early childhood education programme. We highly recommend pre-school teachers to integrate the toolkit into their existing curriculum.”

An assessment of the toolkit’s three-year pilot using the method of International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) has shown a considerable improvement in the IDELA scores in all domains of the benefitted children. Motion skills increased from 44 to 56 per cent, early literacy skills from 21 to 37 per cent, early math skills from 38 to 50 per cent and socio-emotional development from 27 to 32 per cent.

Nguyễn Anh Tuấn, director of the Tây Giang Department of Education and Training, said, “Our teachers started integrating the toolkit in the early education programme for ethnic Cơ Tu children and communities to develop learning and teaching materials. We have seen an increase in children’s interest and positive results in their emergent literacy and math skills in pre-school classes.”

Expressing happiness over the positive results of the ELM toolkit, Dragana Strinic, country director of Save the Children, said, “We are glad that the Ministry of Education and Training had assigned the Agency of Teacher and Education Administrators to coordinate the review process of the ELM toolkit by acclaimed early childhood education experts to apply the toolkit at the national level.”

“We hope the ELM toolkit will assist teachers, parents and caregivers and provide quality education in line with the early childhood education programme in Việt Nam,” she added. 

The ELM toolkit is one of the key activities of the project, “Emergent literacy and math skills in early childhood development,” in Văn Chấn District, northern Yên Bái Province, and Tây Giang District, central Quảng Nam Province, from 2015 to 2018. The project has received a grant of US$725,300.

The project’s overall objective is to improve school readiness and inclusive development of targeted ethnic minority children, including H’Mong, Dao, Thái and Cơ Tu children.

There are three main components of the project: improving the learning environment in pre-schools, improving the learning environment at home and advocating recognition of the ELM approach by the Ministry of Education and Training. — VNS