From across the country... to us

85 teachers from across the country descended on the new Connect Education Centre in Gulu for some phonics training before the term begins. We are partnering with Serve Direct and their team at the Connect Education Centre and were pretty excited that we could ‘Christen’ their new facilities, yet to be officially opened.

What an exhausting, yet encouraging three full days! This was READ for Life's biggest training to date (although we will surpass this next week). We even organised catering for the first time.

We were blessed to have five facilitators in our team so we could break down into smaller groups and have much more quality year-level training.

We also took longer than normal, so it was lovely to complete training on all the sounds, then look at lesson planning and dedicate a half-day to making resources: we were making play dough, feeding a monster words, cutting and sticking phonics fans, mini books, playing reading board games and hopping and jumping for outside reading.

I was humbled that many teachers travelled quite far for the training, three even travelled for two days to get there!

And two brilliant quotes we heard from one teacher:

“ Thank you for your love of Uganda. I now know that I am called to be a teacher!”

And a little later after her colleague gave her one of our phonics manuals: “Thank you! This is the next best book to the Bible!” Well… not exactly true but very flattering!