Upskill a Community to Fight Poverty in Costa Rica

The program here in Quepos has been growing and developing over the last few months.

We are always encouraging volunteers to use their intiative and and suggest  ways to improve the variety of educational activities we are offering in the Community Centre. It is always great to get a fresh perspective form the volunteers.

Recently we decided to choose a different theme every week to focus on. We thought this would help to structure our activities a bit more.Some of the themes we have had so far are, Healthy Eating, Natural Disasters, Health and Safety, Sports

The week starts with an activity where the kids and volunteers make a poster describing the theme of the week and setting out the timetable of activities. Some of these have truly been works of art!

The week is then filled with a  variety of activities focusing on the chosen theme. For example during Natural Disaster week the kids made mini paper mache volcanos.

We are lucky enough to  have a few artistically talented volunteers and they have made storyboards telling a riveting tale related to the theme, such as ‘Milly and the Tsunami’ and ‘Pliny and Vesuvius’. These story boards can be colored in by the children and the key English words from the story incorporated into the activity.

The possibilities are endless, for example during healthy eating week we played a tasting game. The kids were blindfolded and given a piece of fruit. They were then asked to guess which fruit it was. Being kids they quickly took over the game with excitement, testing the fruits out on friends and other volunteers.

Next we are focusing on music…the volunteers enjoy having a theme to lesson plan around together and this strategy makes it easier to focus the children’s attention.