The Young Educators Foundation (YEF) is set to kick start its new literacy programme dubbed ‘Bee Prepared’, a strand of The Spelling Bee programme that is opened to train individuals to improve their literacy skills in December 2021. The programme seeks to improve participants’ literacy, increase their vocabularies, public speaking skills, their understanding of words as well as English Language usage.
Bee Prepared is open to all interested persons however, if one wishes to leverage the training to prepare themselves to participate in The Spelling Bee, then they must be between the ages of 7 and 13 or between grades 3 and 7.
According to Eugenia Tachie-Menson, Country Director of the Young Educators Foundation, organizers of The Spelling Bee, Bee Prepared is a 12 week online based course that will focus on topics under The Spelling Bee literacy training programme.
“It is open to all, and even adults, because most of us didn’t get that foundation. Everybody who hears about such programs thinks it’s for children, but Bee Prepared is a course where adults who are curious about words can also take part in. It’s an easy and fun way to figure out how words behave, and we believe this will go a long way to improve literacy in general,” she said.
She added that parents who want their kids to prepare for some time so they could partake in the competition can also bring them on board as the programme will also promote reading among children and skills such as self-confidence and public speaking.
She said the online course will make use of engaging e-books, fun videos, a Q&A webinar session, an oral spelling test and other activities. Also, the 12 sessions will tackle topics including homophones, homographs, varieties of English and parts of speech.
Bee Prepared will be available online for 12 weeks from whenever you start. And will be entirely online, so participants need a computer, laptop or a tablet with good internet connection. To register, one can visit thespellingbeegh.org website.
Ms.Tachie-Menson, speaking about the impact of The Spelling Bee literacy programme over the 15 years, said her outfit is excited about how participants’ literacy prowess has been improved in their various fields, translating into their academic performances.
“We are celebrating 15 years of improving the literacy of spelling, just like there’s financial literacy, computer literacy, there’s also spelling literacy, and this is what Bee Prepared and The Spelling Bee have done and will continue to do.
We see community leaders taking up the duty to organize Spelling Bee for their students and I believe The Spell Bee Programme to an extent has influenced the wide interest. We are actually excited about the impact. We have impacted over 30,000 people over the 15 years and we hope to create a deep impact going forward,” she said.
For 15 years, The Young Educators Foundation has trained Spellers to represent Ghana and Africa in the internationally renowned literacy program Scripps National Spelling Bee. The Scripps Spelling Bee has been around for 96 years now, and for a decade and a half, Ghana continues to be the only African country represented in the competition, and is hoping to go beyond being a household name in Ghana to become a lifestyle in every student’s academic and non-academic journey.
