Funding The Integral Heart Family School in 2019

A warm hello from Guatemala. We hope this newsletter finds you well.

The season referred to in the title of this update is the rainy season. Here in Central America the rain start in May, eases a lot in July & August and generally tapers out by October. The most worrisome time for us though, is the month of September.

Since we first arrived to Guatemala we have only had one major storm (Agatha in 2010). This one caused a great loss of life, flooding and tremendous landslides.

Yet, even without a major hurricane passing directly over or by us, every year the rainy season saturates the earth which, at the end of season always tends to cause landslides.

This year we were lucky with the weather and we only had to close our school twice in the season. We constantly monitor the weather and if a lot of rain is forecast for a school day we will get in touch with families and tell them not to send the kids in that day. The reason for this is most of our kids live in areas that are prone to landslides, or they live in mountainside villages where the roads are prone to collapse.

So we try to guard against exposing them to traveling when landslides or flooding are likely. The other issue is the location of our school is also prone to flooding after heavy rain since on the corner of our street is the lowest point of the town of Antigua and rain quickly turns it into a lake!

But, thankfully the season is coming to an end, the sun is coming out for the next six months… a sweet reward indeed.

We would also like to express our sincere thanks and we hope you like our photos from this month at the Integral Heart Family School.

With best wishes,

At the Integral Heart Foundation we understand the importance of early stimulation for children ages 0 to 6. This is the time of their lives when the children develop their personality and so we make sure that the kids engage in early attention activities regarding their age. We work in the following areas:

-         Gross motor control

-         Fine motor control

-         Language

-         Cognition

-         Personal development

-         Emotional development

-         Social development

With a different number of activities we also open the doors to the development of concentration and attention to the details. Among other exercises we work in this by: reading, building new things with the hands, playing games that make them run to certain point, stop when needed, sit down all of the sudden, and so on.

We also plant seeds and they learn the importance of nurturing, play with modeling clay, invent your own story, repeat words, learn to fold clothes in the right way, with detail, they also dance and develop social skills in team effort games. We teach them to express and describe their feelings with different stories and also using toys. We also put input on the importance of personal hygiene as well as home hygiene.

We do all of this by playing, sharing and having a good time. They love it, feel very engaged, develop better future skills, and learn at the same time to be a better and happier human being.

Thank you so much to all of you who make this possible.