Professional Development

Our teachers are very excited to learn more about gardening.  Cecilia, our local horticulture expert opened her farm to MDFT teachers today. So today is Professional Development day!!

Crossing the Indiana Jones bridge

We call Cecilia's garden Flood Garden 2 (FG2).  This is because we will be doing much of our learning here.  We also hope to send our older students here to learn from Cecilia's ponds, flowers, exotic plants and animals.

The fun way to get to Flood Garden 2, is to cross this scary Indiana Jones bridge.  There is like a 15 foot drop into the river and when it rains, it cakes with mud and makes crossing this bridge quite interesting. It is all quite beautiful, peaceful...

So, today our teachers braved the bridge to get to Cecilia's farm to learn.

In this beautiful farm, we hope to pick up tips, ideas and tools to help us make our school better.  Cecilia pants ornamental plants and grows exotic fish.

She is Maasai and her farm is part of her Maasai family property.  The Maasai have a long history of farming and we hope to be able to understand Tanzanian history and native practices.

These are gourdes the Maasai carry milk in

Our young teachers spend the day walking through the grounds, learning about the plants and talking about how to apply Cecilia's teachings into our school curriculum.

The plan is for the teachers to create learning stations in Cecilia's farm.  Our older students, as well as visitors, will be able to learn about the plants and the fish by following the directions on the learning stations.

Gold guppies pond

We want to use as much as we can as learning tools. In this small pond, there is a lot of pond science to learn.  We hope our students will do many small experiments!

Learning to chase chickens....hehehe!

Head Teacher Jackie in Cecilia's beautiful gardens

We would love ideas for simple experiments we could include in our learning stations for our 7 year olds to learn.