Guest Speakers this week

Rana Flowers from Unicef

Last week continued to be a busy week with more guest speakers coming to speak to our students about issues that they work with on a day to day basis.

Rana Flowers, the mum of our M & M student Dani, works for Unicef and shared her years of experience working in different parts of the world.

She showed us a number of videos outlining the work that Unicef does and showing us how they obtain support in their quest to advocate for the protection of children's rights.

The discussion finished with Ms Rana explaining what we can do to help.

A wonderful discussion ensued on our return to the classroom and then students were able to reflect on what they had learnt through writing down their thoughts.

Please check their blogs this week for the entries they have made relating to our guest speakers.

Here are some photos to tell the story.

Mr Silas from the Asia Foundation

Today Silas Everett from the Asia Foundation came to speak to the Grade 4/5 students about Cambodian schools. The Asia foundation works in many different countries in Asia.

The students identified problems they have seen in some Cambodian schools.

• high class sizes
• small rooms, facilities
• fewer teachers / paid less
• Teachers may be late or not come to work
• students have less hours of instruction
• students may need to pay more for tests. 
• sometimes there are limited resources like books, tables, chairs
• no air conditioning - rooms can be very warm.

The students watched a video and thought about the lives of some school age children. 

Many need to work at home collecting water, doing household chores and caring for animals. 

Many also need to do some paid work to help the family. They may sell items or do tailoring work to get extra money for the family.

One way the Asia foundation helps school is by helping them assess their school and community using Community scorecards. 

The Grade 4/5 students became familiar with the scorecard by doing the activity assessing ISPP. 

They considered everything that is important in a school and made lists. Then they gave each point a rating from 1 (excellent)-5 (need to improve). If something was a high score the students thought about how it could improve. 

Who is responsible? 

What can they do do - action? 

The Asia foundation has worked with 200 Cambodian schools using the scorecards. 

All members of the school community are involved in improving the school.