MANILA – If our youth is any proof, learning to read, even our vernacular, takes years. So, a group of educators who call themselves Alpabasa, developed a system to teach kids read Filipino in just 18 days.
Sholeh Villoria, Noelle Pabiton & Tisha Gonzalez-Cruz emerged as winners of the inaugural Life Changer Challenge from multi-vitamin brand Pharmaton, taking home a P1 million-peso grant to fund their cause.
Launched last year, the competition has accepted video pitches of innovative ideas seeking to improve areas such as education, environment, health, business and public safety. The top ten entrants got to present their projects to a panel of judges, including Rags2Riches founder Reese Fernandez Ruiz, Futkal founder Peter Amores and celebrity chef Rob Pengson.
Alpabasa’s idea is to make kids fluent readers in Filipino by means of a game-based system using carefully designed flash cards and books to break down reading as skills. This establishes a link between sound and actions, rather than with symbols or letters that have been the chief limitation of previous teaching methods.
The result? In 18 days, Alpabasa has taught 81 out of 106 non-readers to read an entire storybook independently and 96 capable of reading and writing letters. Here’s the full case study:
“I was looking for longevity of social impact and longterm thinking. It’s 1 million pesos and that can go a long way. It should. So I was thinking about the winning idea to be very sustainable. The dedication of the time is also crucial. They need to have enough passion, energy, commitment to do what they do because it’s not easy to do because they are indeed innovative,” Ruiz shared with adobo on why she voted for Alpabasa.
Now supported with hefty funding, the group plans to bring Alpabasa to 30 classrooms, reaching at least 60 kids per set. It is expecting to have at least 1,800 young readers per year and 9,000 readers within 5 years – all reading phrases, sentences and stories after 2 months and fluent within a year.
Pharmaton, in partnership with Geiser Maclang, will keep track of the implementation of the project and will be documented as a “Life Changer’s Journey” – a possible documentary. No confirmation was made whether the contest will be an annual event but Pharmaton Senior Brand Manager Bernice Jalgalado said that it is a possibility.
“We just don’t want to be any multivitamin. We want Pharmaton to be the brand that inspires people.”
“The amount for us is just really the focus of this initiative. It would be on how Pharmaton can help inspire more Filipinos to bring positive energy and change – energy with a purpose,” she adds.
