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Ifaty Primary School End of year Fete
This is the first such event for the school and village which will be continued each end of school year
Jun 15, 2007
In late 2006 ReefDoctor established relations with the founder and director Mr. Stephan Desseilles of the well established ‘Ecole des Merveilleux’ the Madagascan arm of the original organisation base in La Reunion Is. which he also founded. Mr. Desseilles has been in Madagascar since 2000 setting up Ecole des Merveilleux with his wife (a school teacher) and good friend Mr. Nad a local Malagasy artist.
Ecole des Mervilleux is an organisation that aims to bring into the local public schools of the Toliara region extra curricula activities of art, music, dance and theatre. In addition much of this work has been designed to focus around a particular theme from environmental matters such as deforestation to general health and social issues affecting the local population.
They have undertaken many successful projects since 2001 alongside organisations such as Aid et Action, Alliance Francaise de Toliara, ORTO (association of tourism of Toliara), CISCO Toliara (the ministry of education), Association SOS Madagascar to name a few. They have been able to undertake simple extra lessons for kids in art and music to small and large theatre productions and even mardi gras type events using local primary and secondary school children and collaborating with other local Malagasy musicians and artists.
In early 2007 alongside the creation of a new marine curriculum for the Ifaty, Mangily, Tsevenoe and Amboaboaka primary schools (in the Ranobe Bay area) focusing on children 8-12 it was proposed to also implement other curricula activities alongside this new and the standard school curriculum.
The first of such activities focused on the Ifaty primary school, was the creation of a school Fete which was held on the 5th June 2007 for the end of the school year and also to coincide with the World Environmental Day.
Stephan and his team alongside ReefDoctors Environmental Education Officers Mr. Benjamin Deridder and Miss. Carola Zardo and the teachers and pupils of the school created a series of shows, presentations and games for the school children which lasted the entire day.
The day started the school children doing three songs and dances they put together with their teachers. The there was a puppet show about the reef environment (themes taken from our curriculum), and the children took turns to give small presentations into different aspects of the curriculum they had learned that term to watchful crowd. Then the games started some just general fun such as knock the can over etc.. and others dealt with the environment, such as guess what’s natural and man made.
It was a great day out for the children, celebrating another good school year with a 70% pass rate on all exams in all years and also for the village as a whole.
We hope to do the same next year for the children but also for the village to continue to improve upon community awareness on the marine environment.
