
This project was a collaboration between Mya Smith, a rising 11th grader from Pennsylvania,

who partnered with the Puerta Abierta school and was a focus for her Girl Scout Gold Award. The Puerta Abierta is a vibrant learning center for students of all ages with a focus on meaningful education and literacy outreach in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. The Puerta Abierta offers creative teaching practices that awaken a love for learning and exploration in students and teachers. The Puerta Abierta believes that all children and their families deserve a dignified and progressive education, one that evokes curiosity about the world we live in. In addition to hosting an innovative elementary school, the Puerta Abierta also embraces a non-conventional early childhood education program that provides playful, stimulating and dignified education for 30 young learners, three lead teachers, and three interns.
Gold Award Girls Scouts are role models, leaders and real-life heroes. By using the skills they’ve learned as a Girl Scout, they generate solutions to community challenges. Girl Scouts who are involved in the Gold Award collaborate with a team of trusted adults and leaders in their community to guide them through challenges and lead them to success, step-by-step. Mya is in her 11th year of Girl Scouts. She has traveled to Guatemala many times as a child and teen and has created friendships within the community of Santiago Atitlan. When she began to think about her Gold Award, she immediately knew that she wanted to collaborate with Puerta Abierta.
The goal of the joint project between Puerta Abierta and Mya was to provide an opportunity for the early childhood education

program at the school to enhance their outdoor play garden. In addition, as part of the project, a simple and comprehensive outdoor play curriculum that highlighted the importance of early childhood outdoor play was designed with the intention of sharing it with participating teachers and parents. Throughout the first months of 2024, educators met in person and virtually to design the curriculum and select play elements for the patio/garden. The play garden was installed and cultivated in August 2024 and included a climbing structure, a play kitchen, a play store, swings, a slide, a bridge, a garden, benches, a vegetable garden, and an herb garden.
This project most closely related to the third goal of DEY. With the implementation of this project, children in the early childhood program at Puerta Abierta are interacting with a beautiful, safe and age-appropriate play space encouraging safe risk taking, collaborative learning and development of conflict resolution skills. The amount and types of play outdoors has increased. In addition, we were able to educate our staff and families about the impact of active outdoor play on the health of the whole child including physical and mental development.

During the dreaming and design phases we vacillated between creating a prefabricated play space, or using local resources. Ultimately these conversations were helpful in exploring options and encouraging our team to deeply understand the importance of building a play space and garden which represented our cultural identity as a center for indigenous Maya children and an intention for the natural world. Hence, we built a play structure using bambu, wood, stone, and recycled elements. An unexpected impact was community involvement! During the week prior to the build, the week of construction, and the week of implementation which followed, we had an outpouring of both local and foreign volunteers– parents of students, community members, and children who helped in the project!
The DEY funds directly supported the teacher training and parent training, including the printing of copies of the outdoor play manual, supplies for the trainings, and a light snack for 20 teachers, and 40 parents over the course of 4 different sessions.
