Exhausted after the graduation!

Hello everyone once again to my blog!  The workshop is over and I came home this morning exhausted - its been a long two and a half weeks!  We have been having severe thunderstorms and really heavy rains over the last days and the Cassia trees are out in full bloom at present.  They look beautiful but unfortunately they don't agree with my asthma!  

The workshop continued this week without any major hitches.  We had a lot of interactive time with the participants and they really are a great bunch!

We have a session on special needs in the early years, and here at the Synod we have a Special needs department and a resource centre at the primary school, so it was good to have Mr Gondwe to come and facilitate our session.

If you have been following this blog you will know that we have play areas in our early childhood centres, and during our training we ask participants to make samples of play and learning resources so the following pictures are some of the things they made.  These resources will be kept by the trainers to show as samples when they themselves are training caregivers in the villages.  As you will appreciate not all of them are artistic or creative, but we have many wonderful play materials!

for the reading area - books and pictures

Manipulative area - to refine fine motor skills

Musical instruments......some amazing guitars...

nature corner with seeds, sand, stones, water and plants

art area with our locally made paint, and of course clay

the dramatic area -with lots of dolls, but being gender sensitive there are boy and girl dolls!!

the female on the ox-cart

the male doll pounding!

 On Saturday morning we had the graduation for our new ToT's, and it was great to have the 'veteran ToT's' to join in the celebration!  

myself and fellow facilitator Macleod

drama by the participants

 We were privileged to have Rev L N  Nyondo our General Secretary as the Guest of Honour, accompanied by Rev M M Banda our Education Secretary.

The newly graduated ToT's with their certificates...

Here below you can see all the ToT's together, those who graduated in 2008 and the newly graduated.  Only two were missing from the photograph!  Its wonderful that we now have at least one ToT in every Presbytery of our Synod, so we hope that Early Childhood Development will really change and that many young children will benefit from our efforts!  We now have a total of 31 ToT's!

I came home from Ekwendeni this morning after saying bye to them all.  I am tired and for the first time in many years, I had a nap in the afternoon!  Tomorrow its back to work again to write reports and get caught up on things that have arrived on my desk in my absence! 

Continue praying for our country.  There is much instability - fuel shortages are worse than ever and prices continue rising daily!  And yet people keep smiling! 

Wishing you a good week where ever in the world you are.

Blessings,

Diane