Background
Iloilo Central Elementary School is a city school that serves more than 2,300 students. Teachers here are used to trying new ways to improve learning for their students. As the Department of Education (DepEd) pivoted to distance learning after more than six months of school closure, Kindergarten to Grade 3 (K-3) teachers knew they needed to learn to teach beginning reading remotely. They also needed to act quickly to help improve students' reading skills while learning from home.

With a relatively stable Internet connection, Iloilo Central Elementary School is one of the few schools that implement online distance learning. However, with the lack of mother tongue content, teachers have to convert existing reading materials into Hiligaynon, the school's language of instruction, and into electronic copies for use in home learning and online classes.

Challenges
When classes finally resumed, the teachers conducted virtual reading assessments to better understand students' current reading levels. They used the School Literacy Assessment (SLA) for Kinder to Grade 2; the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI) for Grades 3 to 6; and the Rapid Literacy Assessment (RLA)tool from USAID's ABC+: Advancing Basic Education in the Philippines project for Grades 1 to 3 learners.

RLA results showed that 25% of Grades 1-3 learners (274 out of 1,099) needed a “Full Refresher” in Hiligaynon. In addition, 14% of Grade 2-3 learners (106 out of 763) required a Full Refresher in Filipino. Students who are classified as full refresher have not acquired requisite basic reading skills from the previous grade level. Thus, the school urgently needed to implement a mother tongue reading program that would reach the school's early grade learners who needed extra support.

Creating a community of readers and writers

Solution
To address literacy needs in the new normal, the teachers and school head recalibrated their school improvement plan, a major part of which is Project AIM that stands for Assess, Intervene and Make a Community of Readers. Through the online reading assessments, they were able to quickly profile the learners and to identify developmentally appropriate teaching strategies and play-based activities to give these struggling students extra support.

With guidance from the school head, they designed a mix of interventions that would help them instill the love for reading among students while learning from home. Teachers were encouraged to write stories in their mother tongue to address the lack of supplementary reading materials available online.

To date, the teachers have produced 20 stories. As an offshoot, the school started an activity called “Every Learner a Writer” to encourage students to write stories. The school aims to create big books and storybooks for beginning reading in Hiligaynon based on teachers' and learners' originally written stories. 

As of the moment, the school is looking for teacher-artists who could illustrate the existing contextualized story books for mass reproduction. Another critical undertaking was the production of beginning reading videos in Hiligaynon. The school head identified teachers who have received training on specific reading approaches to lead the development of the video content. By January 2021, the teachers produced the first Hiligaynon reading video lesson and shared it with parents and on social media.

Without face-to-face classes, teachers found a way to develop a positive attitude towards literacy, language, and literature among learners and parents alike.

Results
With positive feedback from the first video episode, the school is now preparing to make a series of beginning reading video lessons in Hiligaynon, Filipino, and English languages.

"We aim to provide a strong support to the parents who do not have the capacity to teach reading and to ensure that learners who are struggling or beginning to read in Hiligaynon, Filipino, English have the opportunity to develop their language skills at home," said Dymphna Leizel Jocson, the former school principal under whose leadership this project became a reality.

"If other schools plan to replicate, I recommend that a subject matter expert should prepare the script. They should have a thorough knowledge of the orthography of the language and identify the beginning reading strategy they will use. Likewise, facilities for recording should also be made available," added Jocson.

What started as a school-based initiative has now turned into a popular video lesson among Hiligaynon speaking communities. The video lessons have reached not only parents and learners of the school but also those from other schools who have shared the video with their learners' parents and guardians as well.