With extended school closure, more students are being left behind especially those in B40 communities and rural areas that lack access to communication channels and resources for online learning. Our priority is to ensure learning does not stop for our students by utilising all means and creative solutions to ensure that the children with the lowest resources are reached and engaged.
The Learning Box is self-directed and contains engaging materials that can help students continue learning even in limited or zero bandwidth environments. It also includes instruction and literacy guides, stationary, daily learning essentials, activity worksheets and reference books - with focus on core subjects such as English, Maths and Science. We partner with local teachers to facilitate community based learning on top of creating a learning loop of impact and feedback. Content designers will be a mixture of TFM alumni and key representatives of the target community to ensure they are contextually relevant. Additionally, we partnered with Project ID to incorporate Social Emotional Learning (SEL) into the content. There were activities and mascots in the guidebooks that exposed students to grit and the growth mindset which is essential during this period as rural students are often faced with unique challenges that hinder them from holistic and academic learning.
Despite the pandemic, we were able to navigate deliveries and provide 575 students living in rural areas. By providing feedback forms that cover qualitative and quantitative information on the ratings of the activities and students’ reflections in each learning box, we could gauge further considerations in future boxes.
According to the responses, students have shown an increase in confidence to learn on their own. They are also confident in conducting science experiments, following through steps being guided along the process, achieving outcomes of the experiment. As a result, students have shown an increase in learning curiosity and have requested more reading materials. In a nutshell, students have shown an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 for all activities in the box.
They can reach out to us through getinvolved@teachformalaysia.org
