Hands Can!!!

The kids love art projects so when I suggested they trace their hands and make a picture holding something they like in their hands, they jumped right in. What fun they had cutting and tearing paper for dinosaurs, flowers and rockets.

Then Claude decided to try something else and made a kite. He had the paper and needed to go outside to find sticks and string. Heading towards the farm he found what he needed. His hands held his kite as he ran around the basketball court. Yeah for being creative.

Zippers

What timing!! I returned from Rwanda and told Carol Baney, who has gone with me to Rwanda, that the sewing center was all out of zippers. I had taken many donated ones over the past two years but there were none left. Thank goodness for Carol's network.

Within a few days of my mentioning this to Carol she was at her weekly Rotary meeting when 2 women came to talk about their new business Scraps and Skeins. Ellen Campbell and Lynn Rogers told the group that an anonymous donation was recently made of over 1,000 zippers and they didn't know what they would do with them all!!

Carol got their contact information and passed it along to me. Soon I stopped by their store and saw their enormous bag of zippers. They said they receive many items and that perhaps I could use some. They just needed to know what. So a new partnership has been made.

A huge bag of about 700 zippers was loaded into my car. The black and blue zippers will be used in school uniform shorts made by our sewing center. Others will be used in bags and purses. They have also provided bias tape as well as liner fabric and large buttons for the purses.

Thank you to Ellen Campbell and Lynn Rogers for all you have donated!!!

Scraps and Skeins is a wonderful shop with many donated sewing and knitting items located at 3054 Enterprise Dr in State College. Their proceeds benefit Strawberry Fields that provides programs for individuals with developmental disabilities.

Check out their Facebook page under Scraps and Skeins.

Just so you know, 400 zippers have already arrived in Rwanda with other suitcases full of liner, bias tape and buttons to arrive this week.

Beauty

Rwanda is called the Land of a Thousand Hills. Everywhere you look you see mountains and valleys. And at 7,000' the land is absolutely expansive. As thunderstorms roll in, huge white clouds and dark skies are mesmerizing. So walks in the late afternoon catch this great display. And who knows who you will meet.

A medical student chatting on his cell phone and afterwards we struck up conversation. A husband and wife walking to one of the water stations. Or coming upon a quiet moment shared by a mama and two little ones.

The mountain we were on is called Cyakabiri which means center. We were in the center of Rwanda. A place of beauty, God's wonderful world.

Newsletter

As you probably have noticed I took a month off from my BLOG. It was to allow me time to write the April Newsletter for Hope Made Real. Please go to *** www.hopemadereal.org *** to read it. The focus of the newsletter is about sister school partnerships and the diversity of school projects.

The teachers and students worked on creative writing, graphs, a drama, songs of their country and biomes. Imagination, creativity and laughter flowed and what fun it was!

As I shared in the newsletter I have connected with many local schools in my community for 3 years and took projects that originated here. This time Irene, our head teacher in Rwanda asked if the teachers at the Urukundo School could initiate the projects for this year. Wow is that outstanding. Absolutely was my reply.

Height

The math projects from Radio Park Elementary also included a line graph with measurements of the height of students.

Good thing we have a sewing center where I could get a tape measure. The kids had such fun measuring each other then recording the results. Since they use the metric system their measurements were in centimeters. Then they decided to include measurements in feet and inches. Another learning opportunity.

While I was in another class a student said they had a surprise for me and wanted me to come to their class. One entire third grade class of about 26 students was lined up outside by height!!! They wanted me to take a photo so I could include it on the graph. Then we lined up the two tallest and the two shortest. What a difference!!

Bar Graph 1

The sister school partnership with Radio Park Elementary School included 4th grade classes exchanging graphs. Three classes each took different graphs to work on. A bar graph, pictograph and line graph. The two teachers in Rwanda decided to do 2 bar graphs and a line graph.

Here is Vieteur and his primary grade 3 class working on favorite animals bar graph. After they made the graph, head teacher Irene stopped by and had a short lesson about what the graph depicted and what they learned. This was a great exchange of learning tools.

Bar Graph 2

The math teachers loved the idea of making graphs. Teacher Emmanuel worked with one primary 2 class on a bar graph of favorite foods. The students had to narrowed down their choices to the top 5 then vote. It was fun watching them make one choice.

To brighten up the project that would travel with me back home they added pictures as well as listing the English and Kinyarwanda words for each food.