What's New:

Today is the last day of the evaluation! All the schools have done it, even the adults at the Saturday primary school. It’s been a week of colouring in, marking and inputing the results – Annah is sporting a nice callous on her right hand! Overall we will have evaluated over 300 students of differing ages. It will all be so worth it when we redo the evaluation after Unit 4 and find that everyone scores 100%!!

 

The Quetzaltenango public schools are back in session, and this week we´ve returned to our regularly scheduled programming along with a few new schools!

 

The roll-out of the new curriculum is on at El Nahual! We´ve divided the kids into three groups and have been raining knowledge upon them in the form of numbers, new vocabulary, and different grammar objectives for each week. A group of excellent volunteers has been designing lesson plans each week during our Tuesday Taller de Planificacion. Hopefully by the time Unit 4 rolls around (test time!) the kids will have learned something.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of the individuals who studied and/or volunteered with us this year. You have all done tremendous work. Because of you El Nahual was able to purchase land to expand our programs through the (near-completed!) construction of our new community center and celebrate the fifth anniversary of Manos de Colores, all while continuing to provide children and adults in Pacajá with free and creative education in English, art, Spanish, mathematics, cooking, and so much more!

 

2009 is drawing to a close, and we hope you are enjoying the holiday season with your loved ones. Here at El Nahual Community Center, we are celebrating the end of a wonderful, productive year full of milestone achievements in our history as an organization! We hope to ring in the New Year in our brand new community center, which is nearly completed thanks to the generous donations of our volunteers and their families. We must stress that our work could not continue without your help. Thank you so much!