Methodology and Materials Workshops

Describing the materials

Right from the beginning of our time here, despite the fact that we had different jobs, we decided that we would work together in everything and we have more or less kept that up. Mary prepared a series of half day workshops which we delivered together on the practical stuff a teacher needs in schools. Now generally here the learning environment is just the classroom and a chalk board, so we set out to add a few rice sacks (posters), counters made from bottle tops and flashcards made from biscuit packets and much, much more. Concerning the last, we had to eat a great deal of varieties of biscuit to provide the necessary shapes and sizes of flashcard but our sacrifice will be the gain of the children of Rwanda!!

We started with the schools where Mary works and will probably roll out this workshop in many other schools before we leave. The evaluations have been great and what we have done has been greatly welcomed by the teachers. We did half-day workshops involving 9 schools in the first week and several more the next week. Practice makes perfect and we feel we could practically do it in our sleep now. Well done, Mary, for such a varied workshop with so many different aspects to it, from songs to resources and games to evaluation techniques. It was all there in less than four hours each one. The biggest challenge for us was language. Although the language of instruction has changed to English in the last two years, few teachers are yet comfortable with it and so we had to use a mixture of English and French as, as you can imagine, our Kinyarwanda was not up to it!

Mary in full flow

A good attempt

Maths from bottle tops

The welcome and aims