The Semillas de Amor school is officially in session! We still don’t have all of our supplies but what we lack in supplies and funding we make up for in the enthusiasm of our teachers and students. All of our teachers were trained by Oneness, a Canadian NGO, in their Planting Seeds curriculum.

Typically children who grow up in institutions develop more slowly and have fewer social skills than children who grow up with families. Our youngest children, about 2 1/2 years old, have been delayed in their speech. The problem is that children in institutions speak to each other and not to a parent so their speech develops far more slowly than children in a family situation. With school in session, only a few weeks, the children have made vast improvements in the speech and socialization.

We have the most wonderful teachers. We have three trained teachers, and Luvia who teaches English to the older kids and Daniel who teaches PE to the kids in the afternoon. Both Luvia and Daniel have other jobs with Semillas de Amor but we all end up teaching in one way or another at Semillas de Amor.

The Planting Seeds education system includes the following:

• The Role Play center encourages the children to try on “roles”, to develop the child’s imagination, to reinforce the importance of family and community, to promote cooperation, caring and compassion, to focus on values, social skills and good manners, provides the opportunity for communication and language development and to address the issues of stereotyping.
• The Creativity Center promotes individual self expression, respects children’s ideas, develops children’s imagination, promotes exploration and experimentation with materials, develops fine motor skills and instills in the child a sense of joy and personal accomplishment. The process not the product is important in the creativity center.
• Table Top Toys promotes cognitive learning activities, develops eye-hand co-ordination and fine motor skills, develops spatial awareness, encourages exploration, experimentation and learning through trial and error, develops critical thinking and problem solving skills, re-enforces basic concepts and provides the opportunity for pre-math and pre-reading skills.
• Sand and Water Play develops a sensory awareness, encourages imagination, exploration and experimentation, promotes social interaction, sharing and co-operation, teaches basic science concepts and promotes eye-hand coordination.
• The Pre-Writing Area develops eye-hand co-ordination, develops fine motor skills, teaches children to color within the lines and to cut along the lines and to show children how to write their names.

Our oldest kids, Jeferson, Marta, Julia, Gaby and Daisy have a pretty normal schedule of classes, math, science, reading, writing, social sciences and, of course, art. However, each of the kids is at a different grade level so you can imagine how organized their teacher must be.

The older kids have all picked up English really well. It is amazing to watch them learn English and they just love their classes with Luvia. Today when I came to work the kids starting singing, “Where is Mama Nancy, Where is Mama Nancy?” I was so taken aback that I didn’t not answer back. They waited as I stood there looking a little dazed and I am sure the kids figured I probably speak English about as well as I do Spanish so they finished the song for me, “here I am, here I am.” These kids are just incredible!

Education is the key to change and development in Guatemala. Half of our children have adoptive families and because Guatemala closed down adoptions so abruptly the children have been “stuck”. This means that in order to keep the children developmentally on target we have had to start a school from the ground up. A school has been in the plans for Semillas de Amor for some time but we had to develop the school sooner than later. Our children are thriving in our new school. We hope to be able to invite children from the community to attend the preschool in the morning and give them a nutritional breakfast and lunch before they go home. The preschool will be open to children whose parents are extremely poor. We must wait on inviting new students until we have a solid funding base.

Since we receive no funding from the Guatemalan government, our school is funded by donations from generous donors. Currently, we have two teachers, funded for the year, but need to be able to fund three more teachers or we risk losing them because we will not be able to pay their salaries. Our first two teachers were funded by a generous family in California. If anyone is interested in funding a teacher for a year please contact me at nancy@semillasdeamor.org this is great project for a church, school or community service group and our teachers touch the lives of many, many children. These teachers are changing the lives of so many children and you will be surprised by how reasonably we can hire a teacher.

The photos on this post are of the “kids in action” in our school. As you will see they really love learning. If you are interested in helping our school, through monetary donations you can click DONATE which will take you directly to our website to make a donation. If you would like to donate supplies for our school you can send them directly to:
Jose Carlos Botzoc Crowley
1114 Oberun River Court
Rancho Cordova CA 95670

Please let us know that you are sending items, as we will be shipping what we currently have in the next few weeks.

Thank you to everyone for your support. It is really amazing that we have been able to keep our doors open and have only been able to do that with your kindness and generosity. Thank you.

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