Preschool Projects

While we were teaching at the preschool over the past two weeks, we saw some things that we might be able to fix or help with. Forrest decided to take it on as a personal project, maybe evolving into an Eagle project if we add in a component at home, like a backpack school supplies drive or something? Anyway, we decided to do three things that would materially help the school: replace a missing see-saw seat, add swings to the swingset, and Mr. M asked us if we would paint murals in one of the classrooms - of the numbers 1-10, the vowels, a grid of the numbers 1-100, and some simple pictures.

Another American family here has the mom/kids volunteering part-time at an orphanage and one of the older sons built bookcases for it, so we asked them where their woodworking shop was, and on their advice we went downtown and provided the measurements for the seat and for the swings, and came back a few days later to pick them up. We then took the seat to the school, marked the holes, and took it back that afternoon to the woodshop for drilling. Once we had holes drilled, we took it to a hardware store and bought bolts & a wrench, and then bolted it in place the next day at the school. It sounds like a small project but it represents hours, over 4 days, of just trying to procure everything that was needed.

Before (although they sat on it anyway):



After:



As far as the swings, we had wooden seats made but haven’t found good rope to hang them or a good way to secure them to the swingset. We tried cheap rope and it began to fray within minutes so we took them back down. Trial and error.

For the murals, we bought paint at a hardware store. There is only one kind of paint here: Coral brand oil-based enamel. Hard to work with, smelly, and sticky. We bought brown, black, yellow, blue, green and red, and some brushes. Brushes here are terrible quality, I must say. It took a couple of days of work to get the numbers grid up, and a long afternoon painting the numbers 1-10 huge above the chalkboard. This coming week we are continuing to work on the pictures for the walls: a car (by request), a house, a tree, and some cornstalks with ripe corn. In the other classroom that the younger kids use, a tinga-tinga painter did animals (giraffe, zebra, rhino, monkey, etc) but that is beyond our capabilities and the performance of our brushes.



It has been really fun/challenging to do this project as a family together. We are looking forward to extending it once we get home, to hopefully sending back supplies and equipment (maybe American-made swings/chains?) to benefit the preschool. Mr. M is very grateful and the numbers grid is already an important feature of the school day – he used to write it out on the board but now he can just point to it with his pointer which saves a lot of time.



And the kids love the repaired seesaw!