CREATING ILLUSTRATIONS WITH A BIT OF HUMOUR ON FABRICS TO EDUCATE YOUNG CHILDREN IN KENYA A Case Study of Ngando area in Dagoretti South, Nairobi Kenya.

Children love storytelling, and most especially when the story is humorous. Not all kids enjoy reading, yet they have to learn to read to enable them learn a lot in the near and far future. How then can kids be made to have an interest in reading? Past researches on the use of humour in the classroom have proven that humour is indeed a great tool in educating the young learners. According to most researches done on this topic, humour does a lot more than just entertain. It reduces tension in the classroom and increases rapport between the teacher and student. Authors and illustrators from specifically Australia have practically proven that humour is indeed an effective tool in educating children. In few of Kenyan books, authors of literature have written humours stories for the kids. Humour has not been considered much in doing illustrations. This study focuses on the English language storybooks, since the English language is the most used in teaching of almost all basic subjects in the Kenyan syllabus. The study was prompted by research that has shown how effective humour can be in educating kids, and by the fact that Kenyan illustrators don’t seem to consider it so much as such. It is important though, to note that authors incorporate humour in written stories. The research was conducted to prove that humorous illustrations are really effective in teaching kids, and also find out the best ways to do this.
There was extensive review of literature on the relationship between humour and children’s education, compiled and compared against primary data collected from the field. It was found out that kids really love stories but not all love to read, hence the need to introduce a feature that they would find more appealing and have an interest to read, with the belief that reading offers more than just knowledge. The study not only focused on the importance of using humorous illustrations to educate kids, but also sought to find out the specific kind of character design that would be used to achieve this. Monkeys were found to be the best, and the vervet monkey specifically was suggested as it is one of the most common species found in Kenya. This study having proven the hypothesis to be true, Kenyan illustrators should consider incorporating humour in learning materials for young learners more than has been done or is being done.