The school year begins in earnest in Perú

Where to begin?!? Time is flying here in glorious Peru! We’ve now just finished Summer School/Vacaciones Utiles, which has been an amazing success all thanks to every volunteers' hard and dedicated work. We’ve seen real improvements in the children in all grades, which will stand them all in a brilliant position to start the new academic year in their new grades.

Our numbers have swelled to a record setting 21 at present! Megan Huckins has also joined us from Guatemala to work as our Intern, helping to set up and run our new Canocota (near Colca canyon) project.

Allan, Billy, Caroline & Rosie have worked fantastically with grades 1 & 2 at both schools. Doing a lot of work on reading/listening comprehension, and related sentence structure; and number recognition and sequencing.

There have been new children joining these grades that have never had any schooling before, incl. Isabel a 9 year old that’s joined us at Maldonado. Little Ayde at Triunfo (will go into the Inicial) has been a real source of pleasure and amusement as it doesn’t matter what the question is her response is a shouted “tres” or “verde”!

Jennie, Kaitlyn, Chris, Carly & Alfie have been working with grades 3 & 4 which have also been expanding at an amazing pace! There’s been a lot of focus on math incl. perimeters, areas, fractions, multiplying by 10. They incorporated geography, math & PE into a Math Olympics!

We had teams “from” China, Egypt, Germany and the USA competing, the children had to answer a math question in order to move onto the next race/section. At Triunfo we moved Dayana, Cesar, Abraham, and Hector into grade 3 so as to challenge them further in preparation of the upcoming year.

They’ve been amazing, picking up multiplication extremely quickly and taking real pride in their work. We also moved Jose Antonio into grade 3 even though officially he’ll only be going into grade 2, as he’s so advanced and is making huge improvements daily with the volunteers.

Carole, Garth & Jennie have been developing grades 5 & 6. Looking at reading/listening comprehension, and getting the children to form opinions rather than just facts from the stories (easier said than done!).





They’ve also focused a lot of math looking at multiplication, division, areas, perimeters & measuring angles. A lot of the children have been pretty challenged by this work, but the vols have been fantastic in gaining their understanding and developing their skills.

We’ve also celebrated Carnavales here in Peru! This involves every time you leave your house being on the watch out for a water balloon coming your way, or just a bucket of water! To being chased down the street by strangers wanting to cover you in shaving foam!




Therefore we thought it only appropriate we have a volunteers versus the children water & paint powder fight at both schools. Brilliant fun! There was a bit of turning on your own team mates (Rosie!!), but we most certainly gave as good as we got!

We’ve celebrated the children’s birthdays which are always fantastic to see their smiles, and watch them open their presents, you couldn’t wipe the smile of Pabel’s face for hours! Plus the birthdays of Mari & Billy – both were literally swamped by children trying to give them hugs!

As an art project to inspire creativity during Summer School the children and volunteers designed their own Vacaciones Utiles t-shirts, then with fabric paints created them. Forget London, Paris or Milan, the place to be for fashion is now Sachaca!!

I’m too sexy for my shirt is a most apt theme song!! It was messy, but great fun, and the end results were amazing! I think we may have a few fashion designers or at least surreal artists in our midst!

And now with Eric, Leah, Gracia, Kate, Gill, Laura, Shannon, Matt, Lalita & Kate joining the team, we’re raring up for the academic year of 2009!

The school year begins in earnest in Perú