Improving Education for 5,200 Brazilian Children

We closed out the first semester of our project having given many activities in our partner schools and also in public parks in the southern region of our city, Diadema. 

Each one of the 5,250 children who study at our 8 partner schools received 3 reading mediation sessions and 3 story telling sessions using books of African and Indigenous tales such as "The 100 best Brazilian Folklore Legends" by Ademilson Franchini and "Mozambican Tales 1 & 2" which we published in 2012 and 2015 respectively. The school children also watched the two puppet theatre plays we produced which were "Pepayo's Braids" which is an adaption of the books "Peppa" by Silvana Rondo and "Tayo's Black Power World" by Kiusam de Oliveira which values the beauty of being black. The second play was the "Lioness and the Lion" which was adapted from an Ethiopian tale called "The Lion's Mustache" which talks about the strength of women. As you can tell, through this project we seek to value and reflect most of our children's color and ethnic roots to help build positive role models and build self esteem.

Prior to participating in this project, none of the teenagers had ever worked with puppet theater and we were lucky to have Kalinde Braga working with us to train and prepare the teenagers both collectively and individually.

During the second half of the month of June, we did a survey with the children at the schools in order to measure the impact the project has in their lives. We are currently compiling the data and in our next report, we shall be sharing the results with you.