Connecting with Kindergarten Age Kids in Tanzania

Friday, May 3rd was the day of our long awaited Skype meet up with a school in Tanzania!  Our friend Miss Libby, who has taught in Tanzania, was instrumental in helping us create this relationship. Our Librarian, Mrs. MacDonald, was key in helping us navigate the tech connection. To help us get ready for "meeting" our new friends Libby came to our classroom to talk to us about the specific village in TZ where the children are from.  Here you can see her showing a picture of a village house and also what a girl in TZ may wear.

This connection is one that begin with the idea of giving, way back in February when we collected gently used books for the children in the school.  Since then we have participated in their Paper Plate Project where student's in TZ draw "what they see out their window" on a paper plate to send to us and we did the same to send to them.  This prompted us to formulate some questions to ask during the Skype session and to learn some words and numbers in Swahili! On the day of the Skype, the children in TZ were excited to learn that it was one of our student's birthdays and they sang her "Happy Birthday"!  We were excited to learn that there was a student in their class named Rachel, just like in ours.  We sang them the Orchard School song and they sang us a song about counting fingers.  The virtual meet up highlighted similarities among 5 and 6 year olds around the world!