School!

So, we have now completed two days of classes, and it has just been great! To fill in some gaps for those of you who don't know, this school program, Kids at the Crossroads, provides supplementary support in the afternoons for kids who may otherwise have no place to go. Instead of these kids being on the street and getting into trouble, they come to school here to get extra class time, homework help, have some playtime, and get a sandwich and some fruit. It's a pretty great program. GeGe is usually at about 100 kids at day, but the numbers are a little lower right now, around eighty, because the public school teachers are on strike here (for the third week!). So, some kids have gone out to the country to work on their family's property out there. The ages range from first graders to kids who are just starting secondary school. Here're are two of a set of three brothers. These two attend classes here, while the third (see below) just hangs out while their mom helps with the program. About the cutest set of boys ever.

Mom's main focus on this trip, in conjunction with GeGe's direction for the program, is to get these kids understanding math a little better. They can count and perform mathematical operations, but often they don't have a real feel for what a number means. Take the number 25- they can count to 25 and add numbers to make 25 or subtract from 25, but they probably can't tell you that 25 is made up of two sets of ten and a set of 5 or one set of 20 and a set of 5. Without a real comprehension of what a number represents, it's harder to get really comfortable with math and move onto more advanced concepts. So, we're trying to get them better at that! Here's a picture of the first graders using some fun manipulatives that we brought to explore the number 10.

With the older kids, we're doing work with math and work with independent thinking. Classes here are mostly "sit and get," as mom would say. The teacher lectures or tells the kids exactly what to do, and they do it. There isn't a lot of room for imagination or creativity. So, we're doing math activities that don't have one right answer, and asking the kids to find one of many answers. Like a story problem where three people bought 30 cookies and asking them how many cookies each person ate. It's really tempting to say 10 each, and that's one right answer, but who's to say that one person didn't eat all of the cookies, or that it wasn't split 5, 5, 20. This is really hard for the kids to process. Another activity we tried yesterday was having the kids finish a story after we read them half of it. It took a really long time for them to figure out that they could write whatever they wanted, and a lot of them didn't like that. In the US, most kids would take off with that kind of activity because making up your own ending is fun, but school is so much more serious here, and having a wrong answer brings consequences, so kids don't know how to experiment and work outside of the box. It's hard watching them struggle, but making them think about things a little differently is great. (Here's an unrelated picture of the youngest two of the set of brothers with a puppy.)

Now, just a little plug, GeGe has devoted her whole life to this project, giving everything that she has to these kids. She's the teacher, nurse, confidante, protector, and provider for this whole community. Basically, she's a superhero. And any little bit of money helps to keep things going here. I'm a poor college student, and I still make a monthly donation because I think that this project is just that great. Here's the link if you're interested in giving a donation http://kids-at-the-crossroads.org/donations.html  And here's super-GeGe bandaging up one of the kids.