Let’s Go to School!
On February 3, 2020 Twegashe School opened for our first class of thirty kindergartners, at a temporary location in the Bushasha Village Lutheran Church. Many thanks to the church for offering their space! We’ve got fifteen five- and six-year-olds in the morning session and fifteen more in the afternoon. The children are gradually catching on to their Montessori lessons and beginning to learn a bit of English. They seem to be enjoying school very much. Several morning students came back in the afternoon during the first week, hoping they might be allowed to attend a second session!
The temporary quarters are working out well. We had to do some tidying up first, cleaning the grounds, reviving the old mud-brick kitchen building, and constructing a few new outdoor toilet stalls. Every Monday morning our teachers come early to move benches, roll out our mats, and arrange the Montessori materials. By the time the children arrive their teachers have created a very nice make-shift classroom. On Fridays, they pack it all up again so the building can be used for church activities on the weekend.
We’ve hired one of the village women, Ma Gaostina, as our cook. She prepares porridge for the morning students and lunch for our teachers, since their home is a bit too far for them to return home at lunchtime. (And there are no microwaves or even refrigerators here, so packing a lunch would be difficult.) The parents of the morning session children met on the first day of class and created a schedule for one parent each day to come and assist Ma Gaostina. Halfway through the year we will switch groups so the current afternoon children will come in the morning.
Dorikas is one of the fifteen students in our morning kindergarten class. She is enjoying school very much. She’s having fun learning lots of new skills and working with the Montessori materials. The materials are all so interesting and colorful, it’s sometimes hard to choose what to work with first!
Dorikas is also learning to follow her teachers’ instructions in English, with the help of a lot of hand motions to make the message clear. She really enjoys singing “Shake, shake the mango tree,” and eating hot porridge prepared by Ma Gaostina. It tastes so good in the middle of the morning!
Dorikas especially loves her two teachers, Madame Editha and Madame Joanita. They are so kind, patient, and motherly. Maybe Dorikas doesn’t notice this, but her teachers are also very dedicated and very eager to learn new things. They spent three weeks prior to the opening of school in a crash course on Montessori education with our fabulous volunteer trainer, Keela Williams. It was a lot to squeeze into a short amount of time, but they were definitely up to the task! One of their comments about the Montessori materials was, “This really makes the children THINK!” That’s what we want for Twegashe students, real learning that creates a strong foundation, not just memorization for success on the national exams that are so heavily emphasized here.
Dorikas has finished her first several weeks of school at Twegashe’s temporary location in the village church. She’s looking forward to another month or two here and she is very excited to move to Twegashe School’s new building down the road. The construction crew is working hard to get the classroom ready for Dorikas and her friends!
