Over the river and through the woods….and up a very steep hill!
Grandmother’s house” may have been quite a trip in the popular children’s song, but she’s got nothing on this school in Santa Maria, La Paz. The beautiful but steep road leads us from one mountain top to another, crossing a river in the bottom of the valley to the Jose Cecilio del Valle School, grades 1 – 6 with over 150 students.
This school was chosen by our co-sponsor Leifheit Campus, in Germany, where one of the German teachers, Diana Klein, had previously worked as a volunteer in this Honduras school. Now, after months of planning, it’s time to inaugurate this school with 650 new books of different titles!
After a school applies with Chispa, the school forms a committee of teachers and parents who then create the policies and layout of the library program. This school decided they wanted a central library, and they worked with the parents to mount a division wall in a previous storage room.
We also decided to create reading corners in each classroom. Every week students will go to the library and then borrow books to bring back to their classroom and share throughout the week. Parent and student volunteers helped paint the reading corners, and assembled bookshelves.
The inauguration is always a favorite part, where the students rotate through reading activity stations all day. The students received a “passport” and then proceeded to each station to receive a stamp. Each station presents a different kind of book and a craft or activity. Here, the students explored the virtual world of the night sky and Greek mythology, science experiments about static electricity, and even made their own snowflakes.
Congratulations to all the students, parents and teachers here in Honduras, but as well to all the teachers, students and parents in Germany who helped make this dream a reality for these students to have access to their school’s first children’s books!
