Review of project intention and background:
The Puerta Abierta School and Learning Center in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala has been developing an innovative approach to early childhood education over the past 15 years. In a country where education is traditionally conventional and teacher focused, our programs continue to provoke educators, administrators, families and local leaders to evaluate how children learn, engage and transform into agents of change within their community.
Throughout the past decade, the Puerta Abierta has had the opportunity to participate casually in cultural exchanges with schools around the world. We have received teachers, school directors and volunteers from different countries who have brought our stories home with them. We have organized letter righting exchanges with schools in North Carolina and New Hampshire. In 2015, Juana Chiviliu, director of Puerta Abierta Atitlan, was invited to learn with educators from Great Expectations Preschool and Pine Village Preschool in Massachusetts and with teachers at Maple Street School in New York. In 2016, Juana was the recipient of a scholarship to travel to India in an exchange with APV School in the Himalayas.
This past year, Puerta Abierta designed a bundle of 4 cultural kits that highlight important aspects of our school and community. Each kit contains informational posters and cultural artifacts/treasures. The kits have been curated by our staff, children and families with focus on the following themes:
–A day at school for Perla (a student) and Isaias (our librarian)
–Exploring Santiago Atitlan and Guatemala
–The Guatemalan Kitchen
–Arts and Crafts in Guatemala
The kits inspired experiential and project-based learning with the intention of providing insight for cultural appreciation and global connections. We envisioned the kits circulating through different classrooms, built upon with guidance from educators and ultimately being displayed in a central school location for families, students and visitors to see.
As we had established a heart-felt connection with Great Expectations Preschool in Arlington MA by welcoming visiting educators from their center at the Puerta Abierta
between 2015-2020, and through visiting their school, we created an exchange with the GE community during the 2021/22 school year. In addition, we invited Great Expectations to compile their own cultural kits highlighting important aspects of their school and culture to share with Puerta Abierta.
Our mini grant of $400 from DEY was applied to the expenses of:
–Elaboration of the kits such as printing posters and purchasing cultural treasures
–postage
–Connection activities such as preparing recipes and making handicrafts
–Parent involvement at both schools where children and teachers shared their cultural partnerships
What our cultural exchange looked like:
Upon receiving our grant, the Puerta Abierta sent out our first cultural kits to Great Expectations Preschool in MA. The US school year runs from September-June while the Guatemalan School year is in session from January -October. For this reason, Puerta Abierta received their first cultural kit in February 2022.
Here are a few words from the staff at Great Expectations:
We were thrilled to receive the cultural kit 1 and 2.
We are introducing Guatemala and more specifically La Puerta Abierta Escuela and Santiago Atitlán to both classrooms upstairs 4’s and 5’s.
Carole and I created a visual board a few years ago all about the school and Santiago. This has been spending time in both classrooms this week.
We ask that the children “look” at the board and pose a question.
This Thursday I will give a brief talk on Guatemala to both classes, accompanied by some books to be read in class, and the visual board.
We will introduce the posters from kit 1. I had copies made so each class could have a set to display and prompt a discussion. We will also share the materials that you included and answer questions as they arise.
The goal is to complete kit 1 by December 20 Introduce Kit 2 early January.
Teachers have met already to create a timeline and the contents of the kits 1 and 2 which we will send by end January 2022
Just from “looking” at the board today in class there is a lot of interest in volcanos, tuk tuks, chicken bus and the playground, as well as the pictures of guacamole and chips:)
And a few photos:
Puerta Abierta chose to incorporate our cultural kits from Great Expectations into our English Classes. From January-April schools in Guatemala were still receiving distance learning, hence we shared our kits virtually with our students. We explored themes like seasons, weather, food, concepts (near/far), and cold weather clothing.
From April-current date we continue to investigate treasures from our kits including arts and crafts, recipes and seasonal fruits in addition to past themes with in-person learning.
A special highlight was baking an apple crumble–a recipe shared with our school by Great Expectations!
When our school returned to in-person learning, we were also able to create a “friends” corner in our classroom to highlight photos of our friends in MA.
Another exciting moment was hosting a “live,” virtual exchange between our two schools!
We had so much fun seeing our friends on the “big screen.”
A few observations from Great Expectations over the past months:
Here is a synopsis of our sharing the ART and the Guatemalan Kitchen kits.
We introduced the poster on the Guatemalan kitchen during lunch one day, when we happened to eat indoors and the poster was on a low wall visible to the students.
The consensus was that most children knew about avocados and corn! Many especially love guacamole.
We talked about tortillas and how we eat tortilla chips with salsa and guacamole. That provoked a question?
Do avocados grow in Massachusetts?
We researched and learned that No they do not grow in Massachusetts.
Why? The climate here is different than it is in Guatemala, we looked at our globe and saw that Guatemala is located north of the equator, yet much closer than we are. Which means a different type of climate.
We made guacamole in class one day and had it with tortilla chips. We also have an authentic tortilla press and we used wax paper and a playdough ball to create “tortillas” . The workings of the tortilla press were very interesting and kept children engaged for long periods of time.
We acted out making tortillas and flipping them gently from hand to hand to prepare for cooking!
There was a lot of conversation around our meals here in Massachusetts, breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Over a few weeks we had both kits on display boards that were easily moved between both classrooms as well as the hallway where younger classes showed an interest in the art items.
ART KIT
What fun sharing the art kit and making connections as to what is familiar to us.
There was a huge interest in the beading and the birds themselves.
We looked at Guatemalan art images and again a huge interest in the volcanoes.
We created some art using oil pastels and then going over it with watercolors. We also created “faces” using a variety of materials.
The conversations around these kits popped up numerous times in our classroom.
We are grateful for the encouragement from DEY in supporting our cultural exchange and inspiring new friendships across countries, borders and cultures. Via the Cultural Treasure Kits exchange, we were able to connect children from different countries and diverse cultural backgrounds to build understanding, appreciation, and celebration of our differences and similarities. In addition, we were successful in providing educators with the opportunity to participate in experiential and project-based learning.