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Friday 28 August 2015

"The Best of Me" by African Angels Students

As a part of the Texas State University student blog series, Brittany put together a movie of the project "The Best of Me" which she worked on at the African Angels Independent School. Grade 1 learners were tasked with picking their favourite body part, describing what it was and why it was so important to them. Here's a hand selected few of their projects in a stunning movie by Brittany:



By Brittany

Volunteer on the Wild Coast Schools Project, South Africa
Teaching Student at Texas State University

Thursday 20 August 2015

The Challenges of Volunteering in Rural South African Schools

VA32 are lucky enough to partner with Texas State University who bring a group of teaching volunteers to Chintsa annually to support the Wild Coast Schools Project. The students volunteer in various rural schools including Bulugha School which is on the outskirts of Chintsa and gets consistent support from volunteers in their permanent computer lab, and Chefani School which receives intermittent support when volunteer numbers allow.

Learners at Chefani School
Volunteer teacher Emily took the time to share her experiences and the challenges that she faced while teaching at Chefani School. This is the first in a series of blogs and movies shared by the Texas State volunteer teachers:

Working in Chefani (a rural school on the Wild Coast of South Africa) was such a meaningful experience! In the beginning, it was quite apparent that the learners here were not too familiar with working with volunteers. This made the first few days quite difficult. I felt that a majority of the children were apprehensive of us being there and teaching them something new, which made it difficult to establish a connection with them. This improved, however, over the next few days as they became more comfortable with us even just being in their surroundings. What sealed the deal in establishing our relationship with these kids was playing games with them before we began our work. This allowed them to loosen up and become much more comfortable with us as a group and as individuals.