The Evening School
Assessment:
Once school is over, the children are often left taking care of themselves. However, they should be studying the lessons for the next day.
The call of a game with friends is too strong and it becomes quickly more important to enjoy time playing outside with friends. The homework for the following day are soon forgotten and often not done.
Objectives:
The evening school has for main objective to support school and educative activities, avoid school drop-out of the children, especially girls from a poor background, and open them to new experiments through educative and artistic games.
The secondary objectives are numerous: be a confident outside of the family to help the children dealing with their issues, to be a shelter away from the difficulties met in the family circle; Opening them to the culture and arts and to create the want to discover more, passions or even vocations; to raise awareness about environmental issues and support any civic gesture...
La Palabre wants to build an Evening School for the young by the young. Tutors have been hired based on local volunteering. The insurance of the longevity of its actions is fragile and suffer from the studies of some tutors, the moving out of others for their studies or to other countries etc.
Realisations:
The Evening school was the first activity set up by La Palabre. It opened in 2007 and has welcome 15 to 40 kids, from various levels, daily ever since.
The size of the premises is a major issue that slow down its development, but the pupils keep on gathering in Khady Koïta's garage to work on the main subjects, maths and French. The school results are often checked to assess the improvement of the kids and thus adapt the work to the weakness of the children.
The Evening School also organises out-of-school activities, enjoys every free times and holidays to create educative projects which final results could be seen: acting, exhibition of art, games ... In order to do so, the Evening School is open every Saturday afternoon to put in places activities. Day trips are also organised (such as the ones in Gorée Island, Pink lake or the tortoise's village) and an annual patronnage is organised: a week of activities (dance, theatre, sports etc.). This way it provides the kids with school support but also educational leisure.
The Evening School's supervisors do not intend to stop here and today we need to grow bigger to reach even more children. We hope that in the following years we will find another premise and hire more supervisors for a better support of each child in need, to offer a wider range of subject and reduce the distractions between the many levels that are sharing our small classroom.
