Water School - Environmental Education in Morocco

There is a need for the Water School in Ait Baamrane. We, at Dar Si Hmad, plan to make the Water School a sustainable project with the rural children of the Ait Baamrane region. Our commitment and belief in the power of education, along with cooperation with our communities and the motivation of the participants, has made the pilot Water School program a success.

Having reflected as a team on our first Water School experience, we have drawn conclusions which we will implement for the next program. Our ultimate goal is to be creative with the concept and be more present in the field with the children at least twice a year instead of just once. More specifically, we aim to implement the Water School during the children’s school breaks, once in the month of April and once again in the month of June.

Our belief in education as a means of growth and prosperity led our team to brainstorm our next Water School plan for 2015. The children have no opportunities and spaces where they can learn by doing, develop their communication skills, meet new people and simply consider school to be a valuable resource for both formal and informal education. We consider the Water School to be a positive and engaging response to the needs of Ait Baamrane’s future generation.

In order to meet and satisfy the up-cited needs, we plan to grow next year in parallel with the children’s intellectual growth. The following are some collective ideas that will help guide us for the next Water School:

• Increase the amount of field trips because it gets the children out of the school space and into a different sphere. These trips help the students acquire learning that is not restricted to neither a specific space nor a specific time;
• Conduct more scientific experiments and workshops by professional scientists;
• Include more art workshops since we all observed and agreed that the children are diversely talented in numerous artistic areas such as theater, painting and gardening. Our goal is to ignite and foster these talents by conducting workshops that can encourage them to explore various forms of self-expression. Thus, students can evolve from being a mere pupil to an agent of change in their community.

We visualize our future Water Schools to offer a combination of science, arts and hands-on activities as a way to inspire the children of Ait Baamrane, ultimately encouraging them to evolve and proposer individually and collectively. We are grateful for all the amazing support from our generous donors, board members and fellow community members in making this pilot Water School a memorable experience.

Links:

• http://www.darsihmad.org
• http://darsihmadorg.blogspot.com/