Closing Meal

Monday Aug 31, 2009

The basic 1 month ECEC course always ends with a closing ceremony; all the participants bring something for the final pot luck meal.

Trishuli Training

In agreement and co-operation with District Education Office Nuwakot, ECEC is doing the training for ECD facilitators and grade one teachers of the 6 of government schools in Trishuli, Nuwakot. We are training two teachers from each school for 4 weeks. Two of our teacher Trainers (Pitambar and Nanda) went to Trishuli and did the first week of training. There were 11 teachers from those six schools who took part our first five days of training. We are planning to do the second week of training in 3rd week of September.

Core-Trainers  training continued

During the last 2 weeks for the third time ECEC conducted a core trainers training, one of the results of our cooperation with the Government of Nepal.

These core trainers are higher government officials working in education in one of the districts of Nepal. In the districts they are the ones that train the village ECD’s facilitators.

In this training we are teaching on a different level than in our normal courses; the core-trainer training is a teaching of the trainers (ToT)

ECEC gives the core trainers all kinds of ideas to make their trainings of the village ECD’s facilitator reflecting a child friendly, developmentally appropriate approach.

In this course it is not just sitting and listening to the lecturer.
Making teaching aids from low cost material that is available in the village,

microteaching (practicing teaching by teaching your fellow students),

practicing singing songs with actions is all part of the course.

Some of the participants have quite a lot of theoretical knowledge of Early Childhood Development already.

At the very start of the project they were not too sure about what to expect of ECEC’s training and some of them had the attitude of “I have been sent here and I do not know if I like it”
But not so anymore; now they are very thankful for the things they learn and the skills they acquire during the ECEC course. Like one of the participant said at the evaluation: I have learned much more than I had thought possible in two weeks.

This time the main objective of the course was to use the interactive way of teaching ECEC promotes while using the ECD material the government of Nepal has published: there is a national curriculum plus two workbooks for the ECD facilitators. These materials are very good, but not much used because the ECD facilitators do not know how to use the books. The basic training of max. 16 days does not prepare them for that.

Next step will be that ECEC teacher trainers will be visiting the districts again, observing the core trainers while teaching the ECD facilitators and evaluate  the training with them.
This core trainers course (being a ToT) is an challenge for our ECEC teacher trainers, but we are thankful for the opportunity to be able to conduct this project (with the help of a Norwegian donor).
If we are to see our vision realized (“all children of Nepal receive a child friendly, developmentally appropriate education”) we need to cooperate with the Nepal Government to be able to reach the children in the ECD’s in the villages of Nepal.