Magical Classroom

And then there were two...

Only two more days until our big teacher training kicks off where Sandra and Nancy will be in attendance for the second consecutive year. This time around they'll be coming all the way the frigid mountain town of San Antonio La Capellania to join us in the tropical coast for an unforgettable week of learning and fun.

Seeing as how we're big believers of the importance of story time in Magic Classroom, how about you sit around the rug (legs criss-cross applesauce) and let us tell you a little bit more about these two special young ladies.

Sandra and Nancy were two of our very first recruits from high up in the mountains of Chiantla, where we literally plucked them from the hillside where they were herding their family's sheep for our first meeting. During that first meeting both girls were incredibly shy, muttering just a few words and mostly looking at the ground as we we probed to get to know them and tried to see as to whether or not our program belonged in their town. However, they both perked up once we started talking about the dozens of 5-6 year-old children in the community without much anything productive to do and simply waiting their turn to begin first grade. Ultimately they both were adamant in expressing the need for a program like ours in San Antonio and provided that they could work together, they decided to take on the challenge of wrangling the 30-odd preschoolers in the area.

While they still can be occasionally spotted on that same hillside with their sheep in tow just as we found them, this time around Nancy and Sandra are no longer those same timid and deferential girls that we met last year.

And as such this time around we're counting on them both to help us lead our upcoming training session and to continue to serve as ambassadors for our program and positive examples for other youth leaders in the entire region. This time around there is not a single doubt in our minds (nor Sandra and Nancys' for that matter) as to whether they'll rise to the occasion.

To help support Sandra and Nancy and others like her, please make a donation today.

Hey friends!

We’ve ben awfully busy this past month as we prepare for the upcoming schoolyear and we were recently very fortunate to earn and share with our compañeros from our sister program, Let’s Be Ready, during their annual teacher training held in Antigua. Like Magic Classroom, Lets Be Ready prepares kids for success in primary school, with the main difference being that they work in semi-rural to urban areas and work with graduated teachers. Due to the remote nature of the communities where we go and the dearth of high school graduates, Magic Classroom seeks to mold motivated and creative youth leaders without previous formal teaching experience into effective educators in their communities. This past year we enjoyed tremendous success with our first generation youth leader facilitators, and we like to think that a lot of that success was made possible because of our emphasis on practical and responsive trainings and site visits in the field sprinkled throughout the year. In a continuation of that same model, we wanted to reward some of our standouts from last year and give them the chance to travel from their communities all the way to Antigua to take in the goodness that is Let’s Be Ready’s bi-annual workshop.

Each region currently enrolled in Magic Classroom was represented at the training by one delegate, leading to total of four reps from our different regions currently served: The Western Highlands of Quetzaltenango, the Pacific Coast, Lake Atitlán and the Sierra de Los Cuchumatánes mountain range. There’s no need to question these young ladies’ commitment as coming to Antigua was no easy task, as some had to travel from as far as eight hours away!

By the end of the week, all four were in unanimous agreement that the workshop was well worth the long bus ride, as they acquired new ideas for the classroom and some new friends as well. In addition to learning new techniques and strategies, all of the workshop attendees were outfitted with tablet technology equipped with our new and greatly improved curriculum components.

For those unfamiliar with the different components of our program, our facilitators receive a guide with specific activities and learning outcomes established for each and every day of the school year. This guide book of activities is accompanied by a careful reading of a suggested book, PLUS an accompanying scripted daily audio capsule that goes in hand-in-hand with the subject of the day. These audio capsules have been completely revamped this year in an effort to help reinforce the day’s content in a fun and creative way.

The introduction of tablet technology was viewed as a logical next step for our program as we wanted to continually make changes to our curriculum based on teacher feedback without having to physically print and deliver new copies each time. Having a tablet and Bluetooth speaker combo will allow our teachers to view their guidebook, play their new and improved audio programs, take pictures in the classroom and provide us with feedback all with greater ease! How cool is that!?

______________________

Please consider making a contribution today if you or a friend is interested in helping prepare rural Guatemalan children for success in the first grade and beyond.

Hey everyone! As we celebrate the conclusion of another school year here in Guatemala and inch closer to wrapping up 2015, we here at Magic Classroom decided to take a look back on some of the big-picture strides we’ve made as a program in the past year to motivate us as we set out to improve for 2016.

Here are some of the highlights!

• Improvement and Expansion: Once on the verge of shutting down operations,we have brought our program’s work to new communities while strengthening our existing classrooms by continually improving upon and expanding our curriculum and accompaniment model. After a lot of deliberation and trial by fire we have settled on a program model dependent upon partnership and cooperation, innovation and constant self-improvement. Thanks to a new partnership (more on that soon!), we will also be rolling out an enhanced curriculum in time for the 2016 school year.

• Partnership and Spreading the Word: Once an almost completely unheard of initiative operating in relative isolation from other organizations and educational actors, Magic Classroom has since formed partnerships with more than five different community organizations (in addition to countless other informal partners and associates) and has been to invited to participate in various educational events conducted by the Guatemalan Ministry of Education, USAID, and local universities. In an effort to both improve our own practices and contribute to the betterment of other education programs, we have also sought out relationships with academic institutions and scholars both domestic and international.

• Sustainability and Impact: After once having zero sources of outside funding, we now are blessed to have multiple potentially renewable partnerships that have us primed to double our current coverage in time for the upcoming school year. In just a few weeks, we will be celebrating the conclusion of a successful year of classes and begin tallying the results from our first ever year-end evaluation on program impact.

As you can see, we’ve got some nice momentum going and are in a much better position to thrive and expand than when the calendar last flipped over. Next week we’ll be spending an extensive amount of time visiting each and every one of our magical classrooms to get a better idea of the type of impact we’re having in our communities so be sure to expect some photos and stories from the field!

Thank you to all of those that have given and helped support our programs this year and those that have committed to helping us continue our work moving into 2016. Magic Classroom would like to give special thanks to Miracles in Action and the Tillotson Fund for their generous support in helping us reach new heights as an organization.

¡Hasta pronto!

Michael Estill

Program Director

As we continue to make strides to incorporate intuitive and practical technological solutions such as electronic tablets into Aula Mágica classrooms, the buzz around our program has only grown louder. Most recently we were asked to be the subject of an in-depth article to be hosted on global technology solutions leader, CISCO’s Newsroom page thanks to a CISCO writer with previous ties to Guatemala catching a glimpse of our previous feature in the local REVUE Magazine. Our publicity up to date has occurred almost entirely organically thanks to the word of mouth recommendations by our fantastic supporters and other moments of divine intervention like these. To check out the article featured on the Cisco Newsroom site, click here!

We hope to fully equip all of our existing rural classrooms with a tablet, portable Bluetooth speaker and solar charging apparatus in time for the start of the 2016 school year. In addition, we are also currently developing an accompanying mobile application to help enhance our existing curriculum and engage our students in new and creative ways. These technological solutions will help us save time and money as we expand while also allowing us to more effectively measure and record the amount of progress being achieved in Magic Classrooms everywhere. With that said, we need the help and support of creative tech-minded leaders like CISCO and individuals like you to help support us as we continue to expand into this new frontier.

Please share, share, share our work with your friends and family and also consider making a donation today. Your donation would help bring us closer to achieving our goal of fully-equipping all rural Magic Classrooms with cunning edge solutionsin time for the fast-approaching 2016 school year. We are on the precipice of something very exciting with a chance to truly change the foundation of rural education in Guatemala and beyond. How cool would it be to be a part of that?

Links:

• Check out our featured story CISCO's Newsroom

This past April, USAID and the Guatemalan Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) hosted a conference designed to bring leading educators from both the government and non-government sector to present and share innovating classroom reading techniques. Over the last several months our program has gone through several evolutions as we have tried to listen to our facilitator’s feedback and strengthen our impact in the classroom and perhaps unsurprisingly, daily reading has since become a core pillar of ours. We have worked hard to identify a list of 10 children’s book titles and are currently developing 50 accompanying activities to be included in each and every one of our classrooms all so that children in rural communities can fall in love with reading and begin to imagine new worlds much different from their own.

Given our abundance of original material and practical reading techniques we felt that Aula Mágica was more than worthy to not only attend the conference, but to also present. Shortly after submitting a proposal to lead a 75 minute workshop, we were elated to learn that our proposal had been one of the first to be accepted and that we would were given the first timeslot of the event! Shortly thereafter Lucy, Lola, Rosa María and myself began our preparation, feeling more than a little unsure about what to expect.

While the coordination on behalf of MINEDUC leading up to the conference left a lot to be desired, upon arriving to the Hotel Conquistador in Guatemala City we were completely blown away by the sheer quantity of people in attendance - an estimated 300 in total, all of them experts in early childhood education. While we were initially admittedly nervous, the wonderful even staff spoiled and pampered us from the moment we walked in the door, making sure that we received our fancy presenter’s badges and morning coffee.

Shortly after the event inauguration, we were off to prepare our beautiful and ample salon for its transformation into a Magic Classroom. I’ll be the first to admit that the bright lights and elegant setup had me beaming like a proud parent after watching their child hit a home run in their first little league game; we hadn’t even begun our presentation yet, but I couldn’t help but feel like we had already taken an important leap in our organization’s history. All the lights aside, things were looking quite bright that Wednesday morning.

Needless to say, once the camera started rolling, Lucy, Lola and Rosa María did a terrific job getting our model classroom off to a great start, incorporating the audience from the get-go and refusing the opportunity to simply present another boring PowerPoint presentation. Even though we were competing against five other presentations in our time slot, we were happy to see that our salon was mostly full and our audience very engaged. Once our initial 20 copies of a sample teacher’s guide had been distributed a line of program directors, teachers, academics and other experts quickly formed to ask for more information and congratulate us on our work. Emails, handshakes and pats on the back were all exchanged at a frantic pace, but over the course of the two day conference we quickly found ourselves all becoming friends.

While it proved difficult to include all the nuts and bolts that go into making our program so special in just 75 minutes, we were happy to sit down and share our organizations’ story with event organizers to be included in a future publication to be shared amongst all attendees and other industry leaders. Ultimately, we all felt more than proud of our showing and walked away feeling that Aula Mágica had without a doubt left its mark on this spectacular event. It goes without saying that we’re already starting to plan for next year.

If you are interested in supporting the growth of our reading program or any other aspect of our work, please consider making a donation today. With just 10 dollars you can bring a book to a rural classroom and give children the opportunity to learn and imagine in new ways!