Sunday, April 25, 2010

NJ Fundraiser on Thursday

Hi Everyone,

The Kiwanis Club of Sparta, NJ will be hosting a fundraiser for us this Thursday, April 29th at 7 pm at the Lafayette House restaurant in Lafayette, NJ (Located on Route 94). The event will feature a five-course meal and wine pairings with the courses. A local wine expert will make suggestions on which wines to pair with various meals. Attendees will also have the chance to purchase cases of wine they like at a reduced price. The suggested donation is $60.


We'd love to see you there if you're free Thursday evening! Thank you so much to the Kiwanis Club of Sparta for organizing the event and to Burke's Liquors for providing the wine!

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Bryn Mawr / Haverford Visit

Happy Easter and happy belated Passover!

I recently visited Bryn Mawr and Haverford College, where I attended college. One of the most innovative aspects of our work is our close partnership with the Bryn Mawr / Haverford Education Program, and I went to meet with Dr. Alice Lesnick's Empowering Learners class. The class incorporates an experiential component, and as part of this aspect of it, five students with experience in another early education classroom are partnering with Titagya this semester.

The group has been researching ways that we can further improve our curriculum. They're doing this by writing two two-week long sample lesson plans for us, from which we will incorporate especially promising elements into our actual lessons. When the sample lesson plans are complete at the end of the semester, the group will post them here: http://titagya.blogs.brynmawr.edu/curriculum-modules - A big thank you to Maggie Powers for setting up the blog for this partnership!

I also met with representatives of two student groups at Bryn Mawr that are financially supporting us, IMPACT! and Project Educate in Africa. I updated them on our activities and we talked about fundraising events in the future.

In addition, we recently found out that the two interns we selected to come to Ghana this summer both received funding from their respective schools, Haverford and Davidson. Our intern from Haverford, Alison will also be developing two sample lesson plans as research preparation for her time in Ghana. Luckily, she will be able to correspond a fair amount with the Bryn Mawr class and Alice Lesnick as she works on this. You will hear more from her and our other Ghana intern, Chris when they blog over the summer.

Lastly, I invited Alice Lesnick to join our Board of Advisors, in recognition of her depth of experience in and knowledge of early education and her great advice to us. We were very pleased that she accepted. I get butterflys before asking someone to join our team in some way. We have an amazing team, including people in formal and informal roles, and we'll tell you more about them in updates coming soon to our website.

Thank you also to Nene, Gail, and Chelsea for very helpful recent comments about our blog and site!