Deliveries of new Grade 1 materials completed for seven provinces!

In September 2019, all Grade 1 schools will start the school-year with a new curriculum and new educational materials for the students and the teachers. In total, over 856,000 textbooks, 146,000 teacher guides, 16,600 training handbooks and 9,000 teacher resource boxes for Grade 1 will be delivered to the 148 districts. The delivery of the new materials started mid-June and 79 districts have already received their materials.

Priority is given to the areas with difficult road access. This is a huge logistics challenge with the coming rainy season, especially in mountainous parts of the country. The delivery team is monitoring the weather forecast and the road status, daily. They adjust routes and schedule according to risk of heavy rain, flooding and landslides. In very remote districts, like Kaleum district in Xekong province or Mai in Phongsaly, the road conditions are too difficult for normal trucks. The team is constantly finding new solutions, and cartons and boxes are carefully transloaded from the main trucks to

smaller trucks, 6-wheel drive or even boats if necessary.

As soon as the deliveries reach the district warehouses, the District Education and Sports Bureaus and the primary schools must organize the distribution of the textbooks and the teacher resources packs to every primary school of the country. The objective is to ensure that the materials arrive on time for the new school-year in September. The schools will use the school block grants to support the pick up or delivery of the materials.

The new teaching and learning resources are comprehensive: Every Grade 1 student will receive a set of new improved textbooks for Lao Language, Science and Environment and Moral Education. The new textbooks are more colorful including pictures and diagrams to help with understanding, increase attention and memory retention of the young students. Every Grade 1 teacher and primary school principal will receive a set of new improved teacher guides for Lao Language, Science and Environment,

Moral Education, Arts and Handicrafts, Physical Education and Music. The new teacher guides are more detailed and include scripted lessons, guidance on assessment, how to use local resources and create extension activities for students. The guides also include strategies and activities to support teachers teaching non-Lao speaking students. 

In addition, every Grade 1 classroom will receive a resource pack with educational materials such as flash cards and posters to organize classroom activities, age appropriate storybooks to support Lao literacy lessons and age-graded reading books to support literacy development for young readers.

The Grade 1 educational materials will be provided for free to all the 8,600 public schools and more than 160,000 public Grade 1 students thanks to the support of the Australian Government, the European Union and the United States Agency for International Development.