Creative Writing Prize
We launched a Creative Writing Prize in 2019 and received entries from students at five schools - boarding and day schools. The essay writing competition for secondary school students is to encourage greater fluency in reading and writing in English.
Children in the Wilderness was instrumental in organizing the running of the program. The first round of judging was supervised by Mr Chipuzga of Mzuzu University and a final round of judging took place with a team of jurors in the USA as well as three local judges in Malawi.
We will refine the rules and regulations slightly for the next competition and hope to attract even more essays.
E-Reader – Kindle Program
A few years ago, The Rosemary Pencil Foundation launched the first e-reader initiative in Malawi. Thanks to the generosity of a single donor, we were able to partner with San Francisco-based Worldreader and provide a girl’s boarding school in southern Malawi with e-readers. Two years later repeated the initiative supplying e-readers to Bandawe Girls Secondary School.The e-readers contain some Malawi secondary school curriculum including Health Sciences, Geography, History, English and Math. Each device has a dictionary, atlas, other study guides and more than 100 books written by African, American and British authors. The teachers have their own devices with Teachers’ Guides on them. Not everything that we would like to include on the devices is digitized and available but we are trying to gain access to more course books.Students who attend secondary school in rural areas have an extremely limited access to books. Often the school libraries simply do not have enough good books to read and for these students, for whom English is a second language (they speak the local language at home) the more reading they can do the better.
Design Squad Global – After-School Program
In 2017 The Rosemary Pencil Foundation partnered with US media company WGBH in Boston. Design Squad is an Emmy award winning television series on PBS with curriculum for classroom activities.The emphasis is on design and engineering with a focus on going green. With aid from CITW, local teachers in Malawi were trained on the curriculum. The fun-packed activities enforce critical thinking and problem solving as the kids invent and develop ideas and devices that help to improve their own lives.The older group of secondary school students was working on the Wind Power Challenge while a younger group of primary school students was lackling the Flight Test Challenge.