Yesterday, we spent the day with the students at The Robundo Secondary School in Nakivale by adding a little color to their classroom through color, big and bold murals that they would be able to see as soon as they entered the classroom every morning.
And it was pretty amazing to see how a few strokes of paint could really change the makeup of a room, and cause everything to look that much brighter.
Today, and to complement yesterday’s work, we’re adding some things that will help spark the students’ interests while continuing to make their new school feel welcoming and inviting to everyone.
To start, we hung all of the world’s flags around the building, stretching across the four sides and over the doors of the classrooms. It was kismet – the Ugandan flag landed right over one of the senior classrooms, where students learn much about world geography.
We also brought a giant world map for the senior students, and talked to them a bit about what they were focusing on during that class. They were studying the physical geography of British Columbia in Canada, and told us all about the plateaus, rivers, lakes and mountains of western Canada.
Now that they have this full map, they’ll be able to pick out these locations in relationship to others and see their home in Uganda as a part of the interconnected world we live in!
Finally, we did a post-it note activity, where students were meant to leave encouraging messages for each other, so that they could cheer up one another on bad days, and build each other up and support each other on the good days.
The activity led to the explosion of post-it notes across every surface of the classroom! Students wrote messages about dreams, hopes, love and thankfulness. One student wrote on one of his post-its “Rubondo must shine!” – he’s living proof of that dream.
