Another School Year, Another Empowerment Centre!
Here at our Southern Uganda centre, all the children are getting excited as it is a new school year. We are preparing some new progressive lesson that are based on Design and Fashion, Hair and Beauty and Agriculture. These subjects will give students some life skills and hopefully help them find their passion for their future career. Children attend school from 7am to 5pm and most lessons were book based. These new subjects will be more hands-on. The students will create a project portfolio as they are doing these subjects, they will be using their language writing skills and their maths to measure and calculate. They will write about and draw their plan, write up their activities and critique their resulting creation. They will also need to calculate how much it costs for the raw materials and work out their profit if they were to sell the resulting product and/or service.
Children learning about Agriculture
Children learning about Hair Care/Salon
Children learning about Fashion and Design
Acii our second Empowerment Centre
We have also been approached by a village in the North of Uganda. As children have to walk 3 hours to school and back, they want a facility in their village for the younger children. After a visit Generous (the founder of God’s Grace Ministry), helped the people of the village, Acii, make a plan for their young children. Today (5th February 2024) is their first day. As they currently have no text books the children will be learning through doing. Here the children have made some sculptures out of clay.
A number of activities have been planned for them around; counting, story telling, role play, art and creativity. These activities and ways of learning may differ from conventional schooling because this is the new way of empowering the children to find their skills and passions and build their reading, writing and maths around them. See A Future of Education for more information about this approach. In the north centre, a new centre building needs to be built first and in the mean time they are using a church building. They also need to get some resources.
God’s Grace is a Non-Government Organisation so these educational facilities are not funded by the Government. This enables the organisers to introduce alternatives and additions to the conventional curriculum. They are funded by a mixture of the parents having to pay as well as being sponsored or partially funded by donators. In Uganda, £40 (the average cost of a meal out for two, in UK) will buy a new roof for a classroom or pay for food for the children and staff for one month. The God’s Grace Empowerment Centre organisation is looking for sponsors and donators to help them with the upkeep and improvement of both of their facilities.
If you want to donate or sponsor please contact us. Thank you, every little helps.