After School Learning Centers
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"The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder."
- Ralph M. Stockman
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Even when we are able to help keep children in school and assist schools in providing a better education, many students still lack a strong home support system for their learning. Often times the parents cannot read or write, or have only a very limited education and are not able to help their children with their schoolwork. Our After School Learning Centers help to address this problem by providing students a safe and secure place with adult supervision where they can get help with their homework, learn good study habits, and have opportunities to engage in other learning activities that promote creative and critical thinking skills. Staffed by professional teachers and volunteers, this program is another important component in our efforts to empower students, families and communities through education.
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Centro de San Pedro Las Huertas
The first after school learning center that Avivara opened is located in the village of San Pedro las Huertas. It is in the same facility where our Asociacion Avivara office is located, about two blocks from the village central plaza. The need for this center grew from our awareness that many of the children in our neighborhood were attending school, but often times their parents were unable to read or write, and thus unable to help them with their homework. Also, we discovered that some of the children would "skip" school if their families couldn't afford the materials or supplies that were needed for completing an assignment. With other children, we also found that they were repeating grades several years in a row because of unrecognized learning disabilities. To help address these problems and as part of an overall, systematic approach to improving education, we felt that opening an after school learning center in our village would be an excellent complement to the other work we were doing with our school improvement grants and student scholarships.
On a typical afternoon in the San Pedro Center, students will begin arriving at around 2:00 PM. There are two groups that meet. One is made up of children from the ages of 4-7 who are just beginning their school experience. Here the emphasis is on reinforcing understanding of letter-sound relationships, basic math concepts, early literacy experiences and vocabulary building activities.
The second group, made up of students from the ages 8-15, will spend more time on completing their assigned schoolwork. Our main support for the older students is assisting them to understand the work they have been assigned, provide materials for completing their work and having reference materials available for them to use.
For both groups, after the students have completed their school assignments for that day they are given opportunities to participate in a number of self-selected or guided creative thinking and problem solving activities such as games, puzzles, music and art. We feel that these opportunities are especially important, since much of the work assigned by the schools is repetitive in nature and not particularly conducive to increasing higher-order thinking skills.
At around 4:00 the students begin cleaning up the classrooms and are provided a nutritional afternoon snack before returning to their nearby homes.
The staffing for our Center in San Pedro is made up of certified educators from both Guatemala and the United States as well as help that we get from volunteers who visit and work with us as part of our Service and Study Abroad (SAGE) Program.
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| Gustavo and students playing Scrabble |
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| Students creating paper-mache birds |
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| Volunteer working with students |
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| Zacatecas leadership team |
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| Biblioteca y Centro Communidad de Zacatecas
Toward the latter part of 2008, our staff became aware of a group of young adults in the village of Zacatecas who wanted to create a community library and after school learning center for their community. Each of them had been fortunate enough to have received an education through the secondary level, and now wanted to provide a similar opportunity to other children in their village.
In the center of their village was an abandoned building that had once been the village's salon communal (a village meeting place), but over the years had been neglected and fallen into disrepair. They convinced the municipal council in Pastores to let them use the building and to fix it up. They had tremendous energy and passion for their project, but little money. It was at this point that Avivara offered to help. We initially provided the group with a small grant to replace the roof, upgrade the electrical system, and clean and paint the space. With much elbow grease on the part of their group, the initial "cleanup" phase of the project was completed in early January of 2009.
The group then approached us again and asked if we would be willing to help them with furnishing the space. We provided them with a second grant that was used to purchase shelving for books, desks, tables and chairs. By the opening of school in late January of 2009, the group was able to open their facility and begin offering help to the students in their community.
Seeing how much the group accomplished with our first two grants, Avivara has continued to provide the group with financial assistance for purchasing additional books and to pay part-time salaries for staffing the center from 2:00-6:00 PM every day. In addition, Avivara has been able to recruit other groups in the U.S. and Guatemala to provide additional resources such dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, primary readers and chapter books for the Center's library.
In addition, the group has received recognition from the local government and press, and is also starting to receive support from the members of the community and surrounding towns. They have also initiated community building events such as a Friday night family movie night and cross-country races for the youth of the village. The impact of the Center was recently
described in a local newspaper, "The community has expressed great
satisfaction with the work of this group because now the children of
the village do not have to travel long distances to get help with
completing their schoolwork."
We have very much enjoyed working with and supporting this group of actively involved and positive young adults. They are definitely working towards a more equitable and just society in their country. It is this type of community empowerment through education that is one the ultimate goals of Avivara.
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| Painting the new space |
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| Student using the Zacatecas library |
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