“Our annual kinder meeting was only a week away, the schools had just come back from a week-long break and I was beginning to worry because our project, or lead, teachers hadn’t sent me their presentations yet. I was beginning to get nervous on how our meeting would go.”
Nearing the end of our second year we decided that at this year’s meeting, our four lead teachers would each present a different part of our project. A year of growth had given us a year of learning. With four schools in our program, we now knew what kind of questions would arise along the process and realized along the way the fundraising potential our communities held.
Our original vision of providing a tablet and partial funds for a TV was with the desire to advance English and other skills, assisted through technology. There was also the option to receive a loan to complete the purchase for the television and as the kindergarten paid us back, we’d have partial funds ready for a future school. While that was the initial plan, to our surprise this year not one expansion needed a loan for their TV. One community already had the TV from a previous aid program, another requested and received funds from their local government and the last one asked each of their parents for a quota to cover the costs. All avoided the repayment process by knowing and preparing ahead of time for our program! The word on our kinder project seemed to have spread positively.
… to our surprise this year not one expansion needed a loan for their TV
Leading up to the community meeting we promoted it and received an RSVP of 30 teachers. On the day of, sure enough we had 30+ teachers come out to the presentation representing 6 of our 7 frontier municipalities. Our lead teachers each captivated the attention of those in attendance by talking about the commitment included in being part of the program, how to develop parent buy-in, fundraising and capturing momentum to do other projects, as well as a demonstration of the tablet applications available – speaking to refining motor skills, teaching phonics and phonetics. One of our teachers even created her own project overview video by narrating and editing it. (See subtitled video at end) We told her our IT co-worker would be very impressed with her work!
And really, I was overall left impressed by the dedication of our presenters to take the lead during the meeting, despite my pre-meeting scare. At the end of a successful meeting, we even discussed the idea of mapping the curriculum to match and amplify learning styles through technology-assisted education. Excited to see the teacher’s, both presenters and attendees, satisfaction with our growing kinder project we expect expansion to 3 schools at the beginning of next year and a potential second round of expansion half-way through the year.
