Teaching Seminar & Mountain Hiking

I’m exhausted and was heading to bed when I remembered we hadn’t done a blog last night, nor this evening. So I dragged my sorry butt down again to send the blog out .

Yesterday began with me having the privilege of presenting a seminar to the teachers at the Hands Across the Sea school. I taught some key principles of learning: children learn by observing models; children learn best when they have a sense of belonging and emotional connection to their class and teacher; when they feel free to make mistakes and take risks; when they are in an environment free from fear; and when they believe themselves capable. The seminar was very well received by the teachers who participated actively and had lots of questions.

Teaching seminar

The rest of the day was spent continuing to work on photos and letters, playing with the children and having another soccer game with the kids. Everyone had fun besides JJ who takes his soccer VERY seriously and just could not seem to tone his competitiveness down to the level of the other kids.

Soccer game

Today was another very full day. We worked on the sponsor stuff this morning, visited the school for an oral vaccine distribution for all of the kids, followed by a distribution of donated school
supplies from some visiting Canadians. We had another group of visitors this afternoon who brought small gifts for all of the children.

School kids receiving vaccine

Canadian visitors giving school supplies at IMKH

Little gifts from visitors

The highlight of the day was our annual mountain hike. The children have been talking about the hike since last year, telling tall tales about how high it is and how quickly they managed to scale it! Dieunel has been making sure to walk quickly at the front of the group on the daily canal walks to show how strong and ready he was for the hike.  So this year, he got to come along for the first time. The youngest children are not able to hike it as it is a pretty good climb. The view from the top is wonderful and the children eagerly pointed out all of the landmarks that they recognized.