Forgive
us for being so tardy in sharing our latest South African adventures. We
returned with a full plate of new ideas, new needs, and new projects to
complete. We are very excited to say that we will be doing a ‘soft launch’ of a
new social networking project that Meryl and Laura from Verndale, a Boston full service digital
agency, have been helping us to complete. Very exciting stuff which will be
ready to preview in the next couple of months. We’ll keep you posted!
In the
meantime, we’d like to share more of the 2011 trip experiences that we weren’t
able to communicate from South Africa. Although the main road to the Vhutshilo
Mountain School from Thathe Vendo (where we were staying) was washed out, we
managed to travel the bumpy, dirt, back roads to school every day. We spent
much of our time in teacher Constance’s K-1 and preschool teacher Dorah’s
classes modeling lessons and assessing critical teaching needs. Teachers from
the Indian Brook School in Plymouth, Massachusetts generously donated many of
their personal teaching supplies which we put to immediate use in the
classroom. Thanks to our generous Hope for Limpopo donors we were able to purchase
additional instructional materials while in a distant South African city
enabling us to round out specific lesson objectives. We were fortunate to have
American teachers Amy and Tricia join us this trip for they pitched right in
organizing lessons, teaching classes and training VMS teachers. Read about teacher, Amy Baldwin, in VMS K-1 classroom. It was such fun to see our own school materials
on the walls of all three classrooms knowing that we left the VMS teachers
comfortable using them in their instruction.
