Magical Classroom

This past April, USAID and the Guatemalan Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) hosted a conference designed to bring leading educators from both the government and non-government sector to present and share innovating classroom reading techniques. Over the last several months our program has gone through several evolutions as we have tried to listen to our facilitator’s feedback and strengthen our impact in the classroom and perhaps unsurprisingly, daily reading has since become a core pillar of ours. We have worked hard to identify a list of 10 children’s book titles and are currently developing 50 accompanying activities to be included in each and every one of our classrooms all so that children in rural communities can fall in love with reading and begin to imagine new worlds much different from their own.

Given our abundance of original material and practical reading techniques we felt that Aula Mágica was more than worthy to not only attend the conference, but to also present. Shortly after submitting a proposal to lead a 75 minute workshop, we were elated to learn that our proposal had been one of the first to be accepted and that we would were given the first timeslot of the event! Shortly thereafter Lucy, Lola, Rosa María and myself began our preparation, feeling more than a little unsure about what to expect.

While the coordination on behalf of MINEDUC leading up to the conference left a lot to be desired, upon arriving to the Hotel Conquistador in Guatemala City we were completely blown away by the sheer quantity of people in attendance - an estimated 300 in total, all of them experts in early childhood education. While we were initially admittedly nervous, the wonderful even staff spoiled and pampered us from the moment we walked in the door, making sure that we received our fancy presenter’s badges and morning coffee.

Shortly after the event inauguration, we were off to prepare our beautiful and ample salon for its transformation into a Magic Classroom. I’ll be the first to admit that the bright lights and elegant setup had me beaming like a proud parent after watching their child hit a home run in their first little league game; we hadn’t even begun our presentation yet, but I couldn’t help but feel like we had already taken an important leap in our organization’s history. All the lights aside, things were looking quite bright that Wednesday morning.

Needless to say, once the camera started rolling, Lucy, Lola and Rosa María did a terrific job getting our model classroom off to a great start, incorporating the audience from the get-go and refusing the opportunity to simply present another boring PowerPoint presentation. Even though we were competing against five other presentations in our time slot, we were happy to see that our salon was mostly full and our audience very engaged. Once our initial 20 copies of a sample teacher’s guide had been distributed a line of program directors, teachers, academics and other experts quickly formed to ask for more information and congratulate us on our work. Emails, handshakes and pats on the back were all exchanged at a frantic pace, but over the course of the two day conference we quickly found ourselves all becoming friends.

While it proved difficult to include all the nuts and bolts that go into making our program so special in just 75 minutes, we were happy to sit down and share our organizations’ story with event organizers to be included in a future publication to be shared amongst all attendees and other industry leaders. Ultimately, we all felt more than proud of our showing and walked away feeling that Aula Mágica had without a doubt left its mark on this spectacular event. It goes without saying that we’re already starting to plan for next year.

If you are interested in supporting the growth of our reading program or any other aspect of our work, please consider making a donation today. With just 10 dollars you can bring a book to a rural classroom and give children the opportunity to learn and imagine in new ways!