By Neli Gacheva | Development Associate
Dear TFB supporters,
On May 18th in the village of Brestnica, students from 3-4th grade and their second-half-of day teacher Bilyana, organized and participated in a literacy competition, called “Gramotko”, alongside their peers from the nearby villages of Oreshene and Zlatna Panega.
Isa* (photo below), an 8-year-old girl from Oreshene, shares that for her, “Gramotko” was the first competition she had ever attended. She has two brothers, one older and one younger than her and hopes her parents take her on a trip to Greece for their next vacation. While waiting outside for the judges to announce the results, she tells me that she worked hard to do well on this competition. She also secretly whispers in my year that her math teacher, Svetla, helped them during their math classes by giving them problems and that her TFB teachers Svetla, miss Iggy and miss Deni, convinced her parents to let her visit the nearby village and take part in the competition.
Bilyana, Denislav, Denitsa, Svetlana, Iglika and Vesela are six TFB teachers, who teach in villages in the Lovech region and they work to provide opportunities for their students, to increase their motivation and broaden their horizons. Outside of the classroom, they collaborate and support each other in organizing events for their students, taking them on trips and sharing best-practices from the classroom.
The competition consisted of three rounds: reading, writing and mathematics and it aimed to provoke students to work in teams to solve the tasks at hand. The rules were simple: the problems were of varying difficulty, with the most difficult ones bringing the most points. At the start of each round each team had 5 minutes to decide on how to divide the tasks among each other, so that each person had at least one problem to solve. Teamwork was encouraged and there were no penalties for giving a friend a hand and helping him/her out.
As the judges came out of the “judging room” they carried prizes and awards for all teams.Some won 1st prize, others 4th, but each participant felt their preparation and efforts were acknowledged.
Although 8-year-old Ivo* (photo below) from Oreshene felt a bit sad that the cup they won was smaller than what some of the other teams in the 1st place received, he shared that it was his first competition and he will work harder for the next one because he really wants to bring a bigger cup back to Oreshene.
Teach For Bulgaria works to provide access to quality education for every child in the country. In the 2016-2017 school year, our 165 teachers are reaching over 8000 students in 10 regions, studying in 89 partner-schools.
Your support allows us to attract more people like Bilyana, Denislav, Denitsa, Svetlana, Iglika and Vesela, who enter the lives of the underperforming children in Bulgaria and work towards expanding their horizons, giving them more opportunities to succeed and motivate them to continue to learn and grow.
You can find more information about TFB’s work on our website or Facebook page, which you can find in the links below.
*Names of the students have been changed to protect their identity.
Links:
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
