Early Childhood Development Initiative

This term at Ba Futuru’s Early Childhood Education Facility we have been focusing on science and baking! We currently have 47 students, 8 which are full day students. We have 22 children from the nearby Timorese community that receive full tuition waivers with your support, and 25 fee paying children.

Last month we focused on science, we strengthened the children learning with exploring different experiments learning mixing color, baking soda and vinegar, gas, and the strong force of water. Children have been finding insects and then observing and collecting data “like a scientist”.

In the last 2 weeks we have been baking, the children have preparing their food for their snack with making pancakes, cookies, and cutting up fruits to make a fruit Kebab.

At our termly community potluck lunch children performed a song, poem and showed parents their favorite sciences experiments. We also introduced our new program called “Place Based Learning”. This entails going to places to learn about them and the world.

Our two classes have now blended together for the most part of the session, in the outdoor classroom.  This means that the younger children are learning from the older children, with being involved with the teaching and learning program. We have observed the older children being nurturing of the younger children and have seen them being great models to their peers even teaching them skills that they have mastered. We continue to play our fun literacy and math games.

For our teacher professional development they will be doing a fun games workshop presentation to a local preschool that is just learning about Play Based Learning education.

Links:

• Short video of kids learning

This term at Ba Futuru's Early Childhood Education Facility we have focused on our children’s identity, a joy and a challenge with children from so many countries! We currently have 35 students, 16 children from the nearby Timorese community that receive full tuition waivers with your support, and 27 fee paying children.

We explored Japanese, Cambodian, Indian, Indonesian, Australian, French, German, Korean, American, New Zealander, and Timorese cultures. We discovered different types of food, songs and traditional clothing. We finished off the project with children wearing their traditional costume and putting on a small concert for the parents, with singing in different languages.  We then shared food from all our children’s native homes.

This last month we have focused on our “Environment” with exploring and researching found insects.  We have nurtured the garden and planted new seeds. 

We visited also our local fire station and are now exploring the universe with making the solar system.  This term we have a strong focus on science experiments, and also turning on our “brain button” with doing brain gym.

We also took time for capacity building our team. Our lead educators ran a refresher workshop on play based learning and a volunteer ran early reading training on how children learn to read with a focus on how to teach children sight words.

Ba Futuru’s preschool closed out 2018 with a lovely winter wonderland performance and graduation ceremony for the children going on to primary school. In 2018, with your support we were able to provide 21 community children with a free early childhood education improving their chances in life.

2019 has gotten off to a great start with two volunteers, Lalita and Jessica, working with our educators and students. Lalita has been doing workshops with the teachers on how to correctly use the Montessori math equipment that we are currently making. We have just finished a project on ourselves, and learning about our identity.

In February we are exploring transport, with excursions planned to the fire station, airport, and wharf as well as learning about travel safety. We are also focused with facilitating our Ba Futuru attributes programme, and exploring it with our children and families.

Ba Futuru's pre-school has 21 community children, 8 boys and 13 girls, that come for free in the afternoons, and several other children that are sponored or come at reduced rates. The school is full at the moment with more than 40 kids all together. 

The teaching and learning has continued to grow within our outdoor classroom approach, with children having daily access to sand, water and the outside play equipment, for free play. Our environmental programme continues with children learning about rubbish and how long it takes to decompose, burying rubbish and doing an experiment.

Growing, nurturing, harvesting and preparing food to eat continues. This last term we have re-introduced the Jolly Phonics teaching programme, to our older children, our 4-5 year olds. Children have enjoyed learning about the different sounds letters make with actions and songs. This programme has encouraged children to sound out and read simple 3 letter words, and children are also practicing to form the letters correctly, therefore forming good habits before starting Grade 1. We are currently doing our term 3 assessment of children, and writing reports, this will be followed by parent teacher interviews next week.

We are also in full swing of organising an end of year concert and saying farewell our students who will be starting Grade 1 in the New Year. For this event each class has been practicing singing and dancing. Our older children are learning a Timorese traditional dance and singing a new local song that one of the teachers composed.

Please share the opportunity to support low income Timorese children to receive a great start in life this holiday season-  ask your friends and community if they are also able to help!

Thank you!

The pre-school has 22 community children, 9 boys and 13 girls that come to our facility free of charge with your support. The number of children attending from the community has grown significantly in the last 3 months and we are now approaching full capacity as the reputation of the school continues to grow. 

The teaching and learning approach has developed as we move towards more outdoor learning. This includes starting a vegetable garden and learning about sustainability, harvesting food and preparation for eating (garden to plate). We have added a science programme where the children have learnt about volcanoes, rocket velocity and done some basic chemistry experiments.

Our physical movement programme has developed with the help of two Danish volunteers who taught us how to implement an exciting series of fun games and movement challenges. The result is the children are a lot more physically active and learning how to work and play together. We have invested in more equipment (trampolines, wooden boxes, planks etc.) to support this programme.

We have also implemented a new literacy and maths programme to ensure the children are ready for grade 1 at school. There is still more work to do to develop this programme but we have made a good start.

Please share this opportunity to support low-income children in Timor-Leste with your friends and colleagues!

Thank you!