Math Stories

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Math Stories

“Lion was king of all the animals. He was also the custodian of the animals’ food chamber. He gave the most food to the large animals and the least food to the small. But one day, Spider, the smallest animal in the kingdom, decided she was tired of always receiving the least. ...”

We all love stories. As Jonathan Gottschall explains in ‘The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human’ : “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”

Most forms of early education incorporate stories as part of the learning process. So why do we so rarely use this love for stories to help children learn—and even love (!)—math, and see the relevance of doing math…?

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Don't Forget to Smile!

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Don't Forget to Smile!

As an academic-driven organization, we can at times get caught up in the more technical side of language. But it's important to remember that for a lot of the people we serve—namely, children—language, books, and story are all about fun, play, and curiosity. And that's not something that has to go away when we get older!

Who can forget the immortal words of that otherwise-stodgy chap Lewis Carroll, who wrote…

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Belarusian: a Language Once Again Finding its People

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Belarusian: a Language Once Again Finding its People

If you meet a Belarusian on the street and ask them their primary language, the majority will most likely tell you it’s Russian. As a proud international student from Belarus, I always take a deep breath and prepare my conversation partners for a mini-history lesson about a very interesting dynamic of bilingual life in Belarus.

Belarus, as a land-locked country in Eastern Europe, has two national languages: Russian and Belarusian. Belarusian or “biełaruskaja mova” is an East Slavic language, which has many similarities to Ukrainian and Russian. Most Belarusians can read, speak, and write in Belarusian, but they do not choose it as the language of everyday life. But why? …

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Introducing SIL Africa Learning & Development’s New(ish) Website!

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Introducing SIL Africa Learning & Development’s New(ish) Website!

If you’ve never visited the continent of Africa yourself, you may have some misconceptions about it. Perhaps you didn’t even know it was a continent (not a country)!

Africa is the second largest and second most populous continent on the planet. It’s a place of endless variety and well worth knowing about, filled with not just the pyramids and elephants you’ve seen on television, but also bustling urban centers where innovation and business continue to grow in leaps and bounds.

One great way to explore the many countries of Africa is through their beautiful and varied languages. And there’s no better organization for gaining insight into those languages than our friends over at SIL Africa Learning & Development…

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Bloom: It’s Not Just for Books

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Bloom: It’s Not Just for Books

Learning is such an involved and mysterious process that coming up with good, simple tools that work for beginners is far more complex than it might first seem. If you’re a parent contemplating helping your children learn at home for the first time because of the Coronavirus, you may find yourself facing a dizzying selection of worksheet options—each one of them the product of years of research.

But for the parents of children in some language communities, finding good learning tools is just as (or more) challenging than finding good childrens’ books.

This is why our Executive Director, Dr. Paul Frank, has created a suite of Bloom templates for various kinds of non-book educational materials and uploaded them to the Bloom library. These templates were originally created for the SIL LEAD’s Afghanistan project last fall, but like all Bloom templates they can be adapted and transformed to suit the needs of any language community…

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Information That Saves Lives

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Information That Saves Lives

Do you hate going to the doctor?

Imagine you went to the doctor’s office and she held up a strange-looking medical instrument and said, “Hello friends. I want to give this opportunity now. It can die like a mosquito, but it can also save your life.”* You would probably be more than just confused—you’d be scared. And the next time you felt sick, you might avoid the doctor altogether (and tell others in your community to do the same).

This is a problem that millions of people all over the world experience every time they go to the doctor, or some well-meaning healthcare provider attempts to give them vital, life-giving information…

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Now You Know...

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Now You Know...

Empathy is hard.

It’s not necessarily that humans are inherently self-absorbed—although that does describe an uncomfortable percentage of us—it’s just that life is complicated and challenging enough without having to step out of our own shoes and into someone else’s. This is why the current period of enforced empathy may prove in some ways to be a good thing—an opportunity, even.

For perhaps the first time in the history of the world, all of us are experiencing the same thing, at the same time.

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A River Too Difficult to Swim

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A River Too Difficult to Swim

When Dr. Susan Nyaga started school in rural Tharaka, Kenya, instruction was not offered in her mother tongue of Kitharaka, but in Kimenti, a neighboring language. Not only that, but the school added two more languages to the curriculum—English and Swahili—bringing the total number of languages she had to deal with to four. That’s a lot for any six-year-old to handle, and there was no structure in place to help her make that transition. Susan likens her experience to having a very narrow, weak bridge that she and her classmates had to use across a swelling river…

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