I am so excited to be off on another Tanzanian adventure. I have been so fortunate that I will be in Tanzania and East Africa three times between May 2015 and May 2016.

Bags are checked and waiting for my first flight. I am going to do some fun teacher training with the teachers of the Toa Nafasi Project. I have the privilege of meeting and training several new teachers and seeing the work at two new schools, because the project is now in three schools.

While Toa Nafasi has focused their work on the three Rs (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic) or the three Ks in Swahili (Kusoma, Kuandika, na Kuhesabu), the Tanzanian education system has also shifted since January 2015 to focus only on these subjects in grades 1 and 2. Through an expensive USAID effort and several international NGO partners, many new materials including leveled story books in Swahili have been developed and were supposed to be distributed to the schools in the first half of 2016. I was lucky enough to see a few samples at the USAID office at the US Embassy in Dar in January, but I am looking forward to seeing them in the schools and how they use them. The training plan was a cascading plan using a train-the-trainer model. I am very interested to see if the materials and training have made it to Moshi.

If you look closely at the bag, the white strips are sentence strips. We going to be working the dialogic reading; sentence writing, construction, and deconstruction; and different number lines and hundreds charts to help provide children options for helping them with their counting and operations.

More to come through the next two weeks. See you all in Tanzania.