By Kami Ivanova | Project Manager
Summer holiday and beginning of Academic year 2025/2026 projects
Project with River on my heart
Every year our children take part in this project where they go near the river, camping in tents with some geography teachers and explore natur. Some of the skills they learn start with packing their backbacks with all survival tools required in the wild nature. Then they build fire, make their little houses with natural materials, learn how to put up a tent, go fishing, kayaking, sing songs and play instruments around teh fire. During the day they also prepare their own food with the help of our coaches.
Project Boarding Expansion
As mentioned in some of our previous reports, we are in the long process of fundraising to build a second accommodation floor in our children accommodation on the School's premises. We are hoping to build 14 new roms to accommodate between 45-65 more children once funds are raised.
There is a lot of hard work and effort going to raise these funds this year. Fortunately this project has gone really well so far and we have so far managed to gather 92, 726 BGN, which is 113525.84 USD. This success is hugely owing to the Yana and Simeon, the producer and director of our recently launched documentary film "School for Hope" which was officially released to the public in November 2024. Thankfully it has received a lot of local and international attention, mainly due to the hard efforts made to distribute it across the globe. Yana, Simeon and the school's founders Animari and Zlatko have been invited in the media and presented the documentary on numerous occasions since it was first launched.
Here is a link to the film's website in case you'd liek to see more information: https://schoolforhopefilm.com/
The film can be watched online on: https://neterra.tv/plus/uchilishte-za-nadezhda where all the money raised on this platform sre then used to contribute to the Project Boarding Expansion.
The new academic year has successfully commenced in September, with 5 new children signed up to our programme. Unfortunately we are now at full capacity which makes the Expansion project even more pertinent.
Erasmus+ School Mobility Programme: 2024/2025
Our project manager applied for the Erasmus+ programme backin february 2024. The title of the project was Removing barriers through new teaching methodologies as part of moving towards a better classroom experience for children with social deficiencies. The participants were equally devided between the mentors and the teachers who work at Rusalya. The team was split into 3 different groups according to their chosen courses and destinations as follows:
Florence Italy - A group of 5 participants
Course Title: Active Art – "Understanding and Enjoying Art in the Classroom and Beyond"
When selecting our courses, we were looking at the context of our school and our most pertinent needs. As you all know, at the heart of “Dimitar Ekimov” school are the Arts and Crafts. Surely, we can never go too far away from this topic, so we ultimately searched for a course that checks all our boxes. It had to be focused on the classroom experience, be Arts related and to teach us new methodologies while also allowing us to learn about ourselves and give us food for thought on what kind of teachers and mentors we really want to be. Thankfully, this course incorporated all these aspects and more!
Split Croatia - Another group of 5 participants
Course Title: "Conflict Management, Emotional Intelligence and Bullying Prevention."
This was an amazing opportunity that can serve the purposes of our long-term strategic goals by providing great professional and personal development to our teaching staff members, while boosting staff confidence. What else could a beter chance to mix the pleasure of travelling abroad and learning relevant skills at the same time.
Istanbul Turkey - A group of 4 participants
Course Title: "New Strategies for a Positive and Happy School"
Another team visited Turkey's most attractive destination - Istanbul. It was a group of four colleagues, this time an equal share of teachers and mentors and it was trully exceptional. We thought it’be great to safe some cost on transport and think about the environment by choosing a more sustainable way of transport so we went for a ride by car. It took us only 6 hours to get to Istanbul and although we had the car there to move around the city, we decided to use public transport and that saved us so much time spent in traffic jams! Istanbul is famous for that, but we made a wise choice!
Looking forward to sharing some more exciting news in the next report!
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