43 woman this month | February 2012 | Hadeed, founding director of Mother-Child Home Education Programme (MOCEP) Bahrain. Bahrain may officially report literacy rates of 97 per cent, but the studied population that claimed to be literate was found to perform much lower in terms of comprehension skills and functional literacy — highlighting the need for building a pre-school, homebased enrichment programme. MOCEP is designed to support mothers of primary school age children (five or six year-old). As an academic and researcher who has spent 35 years training teachers in early child education, Dr Hadeed recognises that a growing percentage of parents cannot afford to send their children to pre-school. With the majority of parents in Bahrain not reading to their children at home regularly, the need for quality early intervention in the home, schools and public institutions cannot be over emphasised, she believes. Her 2004 book “Poverty Begins at Home” records the impressive impact that a high-quality home education programme has had on families living in poverty in the Kingdom. “Reading aloud is the single most important area that impacts early child development. The nurturing and one-on-one attention from parents during reading aloud encourages children to form a positive association with books and reading later in life,” she says. Her team at MOCEP, which has been tracking the progress of children long after they finished the programme, found that even 12 years down the line, they continued to enjoy the benefits of this intervention. Reach out and read This January, MOCEP Wings has launched an early reading intervention programme — “Reach Out and Read” (ROR) — for hospitalised children. The programme seeks to make books a routine part of paediatric care. The pilot initiative was launched at Salmaniya Hospital, where 13 trained volunteers read stories to terminally ill children, admitted at the haematology and oncology wards. Each volunteer was assigned a child between the age of three and six and read aloud high quality storybooks in English and Arabic everyday for a week. “We would simply like to provide some moments of joy, imagination and, perhaps, give hope where there’s none. This is a pilot project, but has the potential to be a mainstay in hospitals across Bahrain,” says Dr Hadeed. The project was launched with support from the Ministry of Health and sponsorship from HSBC bank. A colleague from Harvard Medical School introduced Dr Hadeed to the ROR programme, which has been a great success in the US since its launch in 1989. The programme runs in 2,948 hospitals in 50 states in the US, with over 2.5 million children benefiting annually from the participation of 44,100 physicians and nurses. Dr Hadeed would like parents to commit to daily reading routines with their young children in their homes under the ROR programme so that they may promote strong and emotional relationships with the children, while building their language and reading skills. Talking about the stories and events from other times could provide a supportive environment for dialogue and instil the love and appreciation for the written word in a young child. “The focus here is on parents, since they are the teachers for life. We aim to build parental awareness and understanding about the long term academic, emotional and social benefits of reading daily to their children,” she says. MOCEP has its roots in Turkey. In 2001, its first intervention programme was launched in Bahrain under the auspices of Bahrain Red Crescent Society and has since covered 2000 families. In 2010, MOCEP was rated the sixth best child education programme in the world by the Qatar Foundation. To volunteer or donate, write to [email protected] or call 17 292-877. MOCEP volunteers at Salmaniya hospital
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