Magical Classroom

Hello dearest friends, 

At the beginning of this year I informed you that we began with 25 Magical Classrooms!, distributed accross Huehuetenango, Retalhuleu, and Solola. With the passage of months we have had the opportunity to get to know and be able to work in more communities in need of preschool education. 

We are now supporting more children in different rural communities in Guatemala, and are working in El Quiche and in Escuintla! We are providing them with high quality pre-primary education adapted to their needs, as well as giving them the fortified vitamin drink “Chispudito” every day as part of our nutrition program. We have had great results with the health of our kids because of this drink! We are very grateful to the organization Miracles in Action, which has been a large support for us to be able to reach more communities!

We are very happy and satisfied with the work we are carrying out for so many children who live in poverty and in communities where education and other basic needs are lacking. 

Now we are working in 5 regions that have a lot of need in Guatemala, and we have a total of 33 facilitators distributed across these regions. We want to support and reach more communities with need, but we depend on future donations, and the need is large. We will continue working and growing, with the goal of reaching more communities in the country for the well being of our kids! 

Best regards, and until next time!

Magical Classroom and Let’s Be Ready are programs that operate almost exclusively in rural communities in remote places, where food security and a lack of socioeconomic mobility are very real issues.

We have finished our first year with Magical Classroom and Let’s Be Ready where we served a total of 765 children that received Chispuditos, a fortified micronutrient beverage offered as a healthy snack while attending the rural preschool sessions in more than 35 communities. Currently we are in the process of analyzing the anthropometry and morbidity data, however we are happy to share that we completed the hemoglobin and anemia analysis, and found a dramatic decrease in the proportion of children with anemia (prevalence of anemia) in the children after receiving Chispuditos during the school year.

 74.1% decrease in the prevalence of anemia on our first year!

Furthermore, the academic success rate of Let’s be Ready kindergarten students passing first grade is over 90%, with over 70% successfully completing primary school. We will continue to provide Chispuditos during 2018, and are expecting to reach more than 600 beneficiaries.

Dear friends,

We have begun our school year of 2018! In January we had our first training, learning new techniques to develop in class with our kids. We also learned much more of fine and gross motor skills, and of course couldn’t leave out our learning corners made with recycled materials! We have 25 young facilitators trained and ready to work with our kids. The training was one week total shared with our 25 facilitators, all from different rural communities in Guatemala: 10 from Huehuetenango, 10 from Retalhuleu and 5 from Sololá.

Our facilitators are very enthusiastic to be able to develop their classes in each of their communities! Classes began in the first week of February. We are very happy to be able to begin the new school year with our supporters and partners: Miracles in Action, F. Tillotson G., The Mathile Institute, GoPhilanthropic, Starfish One by One and Friends: to all, we are so grateful for the huge support you give us and the confidence in our program!

Our best wishes for you all!

A few months ago we were fortunate enough to host our amazing friends at GoPhilanthropic during their visit to Guatemala as they explored the challenges of development work in country. Interested not just in helping securing additional for the work we do, GoPhil is unique in that they also care just as much about improving our overall organizational capacity. This last aspect has us especially excited as we aspire to someday become leaders in educational solutions in Guatemala and beyond and GoPhilanthropic has just the tools that we need to do so.

Please check out this amazing video made by GoPhil detailing their time in Guatemala and the important work that their local partners do (I’ll give you all a hint: we’re one of them!). For personal reference much of the rural scenery featured in the video was shot in our most rural program region, Chiantla, Huehetenango. We are currently hoping to add additional classrooms in this particular area and could support from readers (and now viewers) like you!

Enjoy!

See our work in action!

Links:

• Travel with us to Chiantla and see where we work!

......without developing a strong mothers group and a sustainable nutrition component that impacts the diet in the homes and provides access to a supplement that assures the children are getting sufficient micronutrients, vitamins and protein, even if the families are not yet able buy or cultivate the nutritious food they need. We will be able to measure the impact on reducing stunting, the most obvious sighn of malnutrition.

We will demonstrate for all of Guatemala that the combination early stimulation, academic preparation and elimination of malnutrition in the early years of life will ensure the success of children in primary school as well as thriving in their lives……and is sustainable and replicable in all rural areas of the country, even those without graduated teachers. And we will have the data to prove it.

Our mothers groups are the key to success. We are providing training to them about hygiene, signs of chronic malnutrition, a rainbow of colors in their diets, starting home and school gardens, and showing them the improvements that are occurring in their children through pictures, weight and height gains, and reduction in bouts of sickness over time. We are also teaching early childhood stimulation techniques and giving materials to use at home including books and recycled items to aid in learning numbers, letters and words.

The mothers are providing a nutritious snack each day to the children in the classroom and are being encouraged to do the same for the younger children at home. They also contribute one third of the cost of providing the nutritional supplement to children in the family. Each year they will contribute a greater share of the cost.

A new collaborator this year, Mathile Institute, is providing consulting service and the supplement, branded Chispuditios, to all of our school children. It is intended only for children 6 months to 6 years old. We are looking for other collaborators to subsidize the supplement for the younger children at home.

Can you help?