Little Thinking Minds makes learning Arabic more fun
Workshops aim to help teachers hone their skills and teaching strategies while extending quality training
By Michelle Fe Santiago
Arab Times Staff
KUWAIT CITY, Feb 12: The Little Thinking Minds LTD in collaboration with the Dasman Bilingual School held for the first time on Saturday the Arabic Literacy Conference with the theme “Inspiring Creativity Through Reading.”
The conference was attended by Arabic teachers and school owners from both private and public schools who participated in five simultaneous workshops. The topics ranged from how to encourage immersive and innovative reading practices, difficulties in reading and how to overcome them to engaging children through drama. Through these workshops, Little Thinking Minds aimed to help teachers hone their skills and teaching strategies while extending quality training.
“This conference comes from the school’s belief in the centrality of reading in the educational system, to stimulate critical thinking, and empower the students with the skills of the 21st century. We also believe that the Arabic language specialists should receive quality training that develops their skills, and we’re happy to partner with Little Thinking Minds,” said Samar Dizmen, Dasman Bilingual School Superintendent as she pointed out that the conference was very timely as many Gulf countries are moving to a knowledge-based economy, bringing together top speakers from Jordan, Kuwait and Egypt.
The Little Thinking Minds founded in 2005 by Rama Kayyali and Lamia Tabbaa is a growing team of passionate educators, programmers, designers, artists and literacy experts. The company has offices in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
“In addition to the suite of highquality literacy programs we offer to school, we at Little Thinking Minds have always believed in professional development as a central tenant to engaging teachers and by extension students. It is essential to complement ICT tools with elevating skill sets. We’re very excited about this conference and to be entering the Kuwaiti Market,” stated Lamia Tabbaa, Co-Founder and head of Communication and Engagement at Little Thinking Minds LTD.
Five literacy experts spearheaded the intensive workshops for Arabic teachers all over Kuwait.
“Our team in partnership with Dasman Bilingual School is here to impart the right training skill sets and programs among teachers of the Arabic language, on Arabic literacy, the importance of reading, the importance of critical thinking and how you can encourage other higher skills, workshop on how teachers can use drama skills within the Arabic classroom to make it more engaging and have children learn the language. We’re also trying to focus on the core importance of Arabic literacy,” explained Little Thinking Minds Marketing and Sales Director Supriya Dominica who was with the delegation.
Little Thinking Minds is an Education Technology company that creates educational products and resources for school-aged children (4-12 years of age) with the aim of improving learning outcomes, advancing skills and increasing social and cultural connect- edness in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Their products are being used in over 200 public and private schools across the MENA region, as well in select school systems in Australia, Canada, and North America. To date, LTM products have reached over 100,000 students globally.
“We are an educational company and the main mission of our company is to improve learning outcomes. The age bracket that we cater to is from pre-K (kindergarten) to the age of 14, 15 and most of our programs are individualized. They are built around the knowledge and needs of students and we provide individualized learning solutions. With our programs, every student has his or her own log-in information and they can access the program be it at school or at home and they have this continued enrichment,” pointed out Dominica.
She highlighted that the Little Thinking Minds encourages students to learn Arabic language and literature in a more fun and engaging manner.
“We use modern standard Arabic across all the Arab countries. We have taken very interesting children’s story books and different contents, some are fictional some are non-fictional and we have digitized them on the program. We have at the moment 650 books on our core advanced program. Most of our contents are from Arab winning authors,” she outlined.
In this digital era, educational learning is made easy and accessible to everyone as the Little Thinking Minds team continues to work with a team of literacy experts to align its programs with school curriculum.
“Our programs suit the needs of everybody, be they non-native or native students, we have something to offer to everyone to help them learn Arabic in a more fun and engaging manner. We have created videos. There are a lot of contents. There are work sheets. Teachers can use these to flip the classroom. It’s bringing the digital era into the Arabic classroom. In some places, like some of our programs especially the non-native program “I Start Arabic,” it’s aligned with curriculum so we have a team of literacy experts that we work with. They study the curriculum and they study the Arabic Children’s literature that’s published and what’s on the market. What we basically do is we try and align common literature to the curriculum goals and learning objectives,” beamed Dominica.