My First Week- Weekly Summary by Ingrid
Last week, Casa Búho said a bittersweet goodbye to the 2017-2019 Peace Corps volunteer, Trish.
My name is Ingrid and I’m very excited to begin working with the beautiful literacy program that is Casa Búho, sharing stories and creating artwork masterpieces. As the new volunteer for Casa Búho, I quickly took over the ‘Hora de Creatividad’ from Trish and within the week, we’ve already had buckets of fun!
Our morning and afternoon reading groups tackled a new book for the storytelling hour: ‘La Hora del Cuento’ – La Historia de por que los Perros tiene el Hocico Húmedo, a beautifully illustrated story based on an ancient Norwegian tale. To follow the oceanic, and dog-centered theme of the book, we created pups in their doghouses, jellyfish, and popsicles to cool off at the end!
In Baby Búhos, we experimented with the senses of touch and sight with sensory bags. The toddlers mixed around the paint to create patterns and different colors within the animal outline drawn on the bag. This helped them recognize the mixture of different hues along with incorporating their experimentation of touch.
To celebrate the International Day of the Elephant, one of our afternoon reading sessions and our Peque Búhos group crafted their own versions of elephants! The older group learned a simple form of origami to shape the head and colored in their own styles.
After reading Elmer the Elephant, Peque Búhos practiced a new song called “Camino por la Selva” or Walking in the Jungle and we had fun identifying the many animal noises of the jungle. Then the peque búhos quite literally got their hands dirty with a handprint elephant!
Friday arrived almost all too quickly! Our morning and afternoon reading classes are held at the Casa Búho in Los Ciriales at the storage container. Our morning class recorded a new video for our pilot “video pal” program with a school in Uruguay. This involved a burning of palo santo to prevent mosquitos but also share a sliver of the magnificent culture and traditions that the Ecuadorian coast has to offer. We are very excited to continue our communication with the students in Uruguay and the Casa Búho kiddos are, too! We’re eagerly waiting their response to what traditions they might have in their communities.
