Jesus Club Singapore organises an annual training event for volunteers to better equip them to serve our members with intellectual disabilities (ID). This year, we held our training event at Bethesda Frankel Estate Church on 13 May, with 41 volunteers across 3 Jesus Clubs in attendance.

Yafen, a speech and language therapist in the special needs sector, conducted the training on the topic of Easy Read. Her presentation had 3 parts:

What is Easy Read?

We learnt that Easy Read is a way of making written information easier to understand. It comes down to 2 key ideas: short, jargon-free sentences and simple, clear images. By using Easy Read principles, we’re able to make written information more accessible for our members.

How to prepare Easy Read materials?

In this practical segment, we learnt about the kind of layout, the types of fonts and pictures, and the sorts of words that would aid understanding for our members.

Hands-on session

Yafen made sure we didn’t leave the training with simply head knowledge. She’d earlier obtained a slide deck from a recent JC meeting. She divided us into small groups to work at applying Easy Read principles to different slides in that deck: announcement slides, song slides, talk slides, and even the big idea and prayer slides! This was a really helpful exercise to get us thinking about how to prepare Easy Read materials for JC.

Our prayer is that with tools like Easy Read, JC volunteers will be better equipped to teach the Bible to our friends with ID, so that every member can know God to the extent that He has enabled him or her.