By Katy Allen | Director
The last months have been busy.
Mama Sandi continues to give weekly training sessions for primary school teachers in order to help the teachers increase their knowledge and confidence. The Whole School Development Programme is extending to two more primary schools, Mengeni and Sembeti and Mama Mkure who is the co-ordinator of a nearby teachers' resource centre is to lead the work in these two school.
Jane Firth returned on 2nd October to give assistance to teachers of pre-primary schools and those of the first year of primary school. Again, her emphasis was on basic number work so that the children understand 'number correspondence', 'number bonds' and 'place value'. The teachers were introduced to many activities, including the use of number squares - or 100 squares - and dominoes, and the use of bottle top and kidney beans for counting, and bundles of cut-up drinking straws for the understanding of units and tens and their place value. They also worked on story-telling for the young children.
In August Dr Anne Samson, Dilly Mtui and Katy Allen attended the 6th Pan African Reading for All Conference held at the University of Dar es Salaam. They gave a colloquium on the work of the Whole Schoool Development Programme and the plans to introduce material for the teaching of English as a foreign language. The latter gave rise to significant interest and at the end of the presentation members of the audience flocked to the front desk to learn more about the availability of the material.
Katy Allen met both the Permanent Secretary and the Minister for Education at the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training in Dar es Salaam to discuss the plans for those English materials. In September Katy wrote and submitted a Concept Paper and it is expected that the plans will progress for the material to be introduced in the primary schools in January 2011.
Plans are in place for another workshop to be held for District Education Officers and Chief Inspectors for each of the seven districts that comprise the Kilimanjaro Region. Negotiations are progressing with the Business School of the University of Dar es Salaam for them to facilitate training in communcation and management. If all goes well the workshop will be held for three days in early February 2010.
Please see the attached document for photographs of our latest work.
Thank you again to all our donors for the invaluable support to our work. This is helping us to achieve our goals of dealing with all strands of the primary education system. We are working at the grass roots to find out the real problems, their causes and to try to solve them, and then we are liaising at District level and now at Ministerial level to influence some changes. There is still much to be done - slowly but surely we are improving the quality of primary education. Thank you all again and we are very happy to hear your views or to deal with any questions.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
