One of the kids that we individually tutor in Prague is little Mirek. He attends the 2nd class of elementary school. Because Mirek started having problems there, his mum asked us for help. Her son has speech problems and in addition, he was not able to do comprehension reading at all. Especially because he was not interested in reading. He liked playing PC games and making videos on Youtube more.
Then we found a great volunteer Katka withing the tutoring program. She had a similar situation in her family and she is interested in drawing, music and is also very creative. She successfully applied her hobbies on tutoring Mirek. She started to create his own comics for him to read and complete them together. Step by step, Mirek began to like reading more and more. He even asked Katka to copy real books for him. He started reading alone, in his leisure time, which improved his writing immediately. He used to completely ignore all the spaces between words and was writing each sentence as a one whole. But within only two months he got better rapidly! Even though we know there is still going to be a lot of work with little Mirek, we notice him being interested and that drives us all.
Jana, educational services in People in Need’s Programs of Social Integration