Long-Awaited Operations Update

So we can't believe there's only two weeks left in this semester... the time has flown by! Luckily we are all in good shape to present our curriculum plans to the class next week. Hopefully those who are going on the trip to the Dominican Republic will get a better insight to what they can do to help us present the curriculum to the teachers abroad.

We've been working diligently on our English and technology education curriculum plans for the past few weeks. To make the language learning more interesting, we divided up the curriculum into numerous units, such as weather, colors and numbers, home and family, classroom words, body parts, food, and common phrases. It has been fun coming up with creative ideas to teach the Dominican students English in comparison to the traditional ways we learned a second language. Hopefully our hands-on activities and self-correcting learning centers will be very useful as the students attempt to take on the English language. The materials we designed will also be easy on the teachers in the centers, so that they are not expected to lecture on grammatical points but rather have the students put these ideas into practice.

Building technology education has been rough, but the curriculum itself is moving along swiftly. The problem lies in finding compatible software in Spanish (such as computer games or typing programs), which the students can use to enhance their comptuter and typing skills. Right now we are looking into seeking some donations from local companies who may have similar software programs. Hopefully a solution to this problem will come around this week!
While we've only got a short while left to complete all of the aspects of the curriculum for the child development centers, we can't wait to finish and see the results of our hard work for the semester. It will be so rewarding when we finally visit the Dominican Republic, deliver our materials, and really see how our curriculum development will aid childrens' education abroad.