This teacher from Gaiman School was special!! She held gardening and carpentry lessons with different groups throughout the day, every day. Here, she chats with the children about the little creatures that live in the compost. She and the children created a composting chest out of wood and added vegetable and fruit peels from the school kitchen daily. The children helped her stir the mixture with a tool similar to an auger and then opened the bottom of the chest to pull out the ripe compost. They then filtered the compost through several different rods until they managed to create the perfect compost to use for planting seeds! She was so practical and interesting and the children loved learning with her.
This is another special teacher at Ysgol y Cwm, Trevelin. Here, she led a music lesson with the reception year children and introduced them to a piece of music by composer Johannes Brahms and showed the children a picture of it. Listening to the music they had played various instruments and managed to get everyone to stick to the rhythm particularly effectively by pointing to the large characters on pieces of paper on the floor in the middle of the circle. All the children then danced to the music and used great listening skills in moving to the music; varies when moving quickly or slowly, on toes (to represent high nodes) and then crouching down to represent the low nodes, taking big steps or small steps, showing happy and sad feelings, etc. Incredible!
It was absolutely thrilling to hear children from the other end of the world singing in Welsh! Here are a group of Ysgol Trelew juniors enjoying with a talented local teacher and musician and singing “Tyrd am dro i’r coed” by Dafydd Iwan. There was great pride in celebrating Welshness in every school and teachers worked very hard to reinforce this message through singing, folk dancing, reciting and acting through the medium of Welsh. Everyone was busy preparing for the big Eisteddfod at the end of the month and enjoying the rehearsals, both during lessons and after school too! I feel that the sense of belonging is very important to the Welsh in Patagonia and this feeds the rich culture.