Recycling

The past few days have been spent rummaging through the cast offs at the construction site here at Timothy Centre, salvaging ‘valuable’ items for the learning aids we make for our school in Kibaale.  I am also making sample learning aids for the teacher development programs we will be offering soon at the Timothy Centre.

Cardboard pieces are very useful for make ‘big books’ for the classes, especially since there are next to no books available for teaching students beginning reading in Luganda.  So…we create our own…

The empty tile boxes and plastic strapping can be used not only for making books, but for making puzzles and math learning aids.  So this…

Becomes this…

The piles of small, broken pieces of slate left over from the construction of the retaining walls yield all sorts of interesting objects for students to use for sorting and classifying…

And the big smooth seeds from the jackfruits that grow in abundance here make great math counters and markers for board games…

  In so many schools here in Uganda, resources are in very short supply, so if we can teach the teachers how to make effective, low cost learning aids with the materials that are around them (and often thrown out), we are able to help students learn so much better.  It’s a test of creativity!

And speaking of recycling, we have found a great use for old water bottles in our garden.  In the dry season when plants struggle to survive, an inverted water bottle at the base of the plant provides a simple form of irrigation and keeps garden plants thriving!