Seeing Double Impact with our ‘Kid Teacher’ Program
“There is always a before and after in your life” said 11-year old Iara (pronouned Yara). For her that point of change was getting involved with the Superkids Foundation. Before Superkids she had several behavioural issues in school, always talking back to her teachers and disinterest towards learning or being involved in any activities. But according Lara, “Superkids woke me up.”
Iara is now an active member of our ‘Kid Teachers’ program. In the first year of the program we have trained 10 students to act as teachers, peer mentors and leaders in their school and community. Within the first three months, the ‘Kid Teachers’ have taught over 500 hours of literacy lessons to younger students.
Programs like, ‘Kid Teachers’, have been shown to provide immense benefits to both ‘student’ and ‘teacher,’ resulting in double impact! Our ‘Kid Teachers’ boosted their self-esteem and self-efficacy. These type of programs also have been shown to improve feelings of connectedness to their schools and peers, social behavior and attitudes, along with improvements in their grades and academic achievement.
On the ‘students’ side of the equation, these programs have reported improvements in self-esteem, school connection, empathy and moral reasoning, intrapersonal communication and conflict resolution skills. They also support improvement in the relationships between the children and both their parents and teachers.
An added benefit we have seen from our ‘Kid Teachers’ that we weren’t expecting – is many of them have become full-fledged community activists! On a visit to the national congress, Iara spoke before the Paraguayan Senate for three minutes about the needs of street children. Another ‘Kid Teacher’ Pamela spoke to her Governor about her friends and classmates who don’t eat breakfast or lunch, lobbying to reinitiate a school snack program. We could go on and on – the number of stories we have like this are endless, the benefits we have seen from this program have been life-changing.
For this reason, and due to the backing from our amazing ‘Super-Supporters’, we are aiming to expand our ‘Kid Teacher’ program to other schools next year. We hope to be able to reach an even wider community! If you want to help that vision come to life, go to our donation page and you can give directly to this amazing program.