In October 2014, the GoodPlanet Foundation officially opened a bioclimatic nursery school near Agadir, in the municipality of Drarga, in the village of Aknaibich. These preschool facilities are not funded by the State and are still too few in rural areas in Morocco, which leads to important education backwardness for young students.
On 18 January 2016, our project officer, Claire Sellier, went there to meet the children. Here is her trip story:
« What a nice temperature today inside the school building! The thermometer in the playground indicates a little 8°C. In the neighbor primary school, housed in prefabricated buildings, students are cuddling up to their jackets, but, just a few steps away, young students from the nursery school, the « préscolaire » as it is called in Morocco, fully enjoy their new warm classroom, built with natural materials. Soil heating properties, thermal insulation and building positioning fully play their role to ensure an ideal comfort for the learning process of young children.
The teacher puts down a watchful eye on the work of these little students by going through the classroom with her crutches. She is so proud, Hadia, of this new classroom, bright, spacious and well equipped. She guides her students through the discovery of the school. All of this is quite new for all the young children: remaining seated on a chair, holding a pencil, quietly listening at the teacher… And so many novelties: at home, they speak the tachelhit (Berber language) or the darija (Moroccan dialectal Arabic), but, at school, they discover the French and the literary Arabic, and they learn how to write the letters in 3 different alphabets! This is a big challenge!
A few steps in the playground and I get into the classroom of the first and second fundamental years (the equivalent of the CP and CE1 in France). I am welcomed with a very loud « Good morning madam! » strike up by the 36 students. Aziz, the teacher, talks to me about his young students. He explains how nursery school makes it all different: « We can immediately see children who did not go to nursery school! They are less advanced than the others, have difficulties in getting concentrated, staying on their chair, they do not understand the instructions, they are clumsy with their pencil… They need around 4 months to get used to their new environment, and, by this time, it is too late already, they missed half of the programme, and, for them, repeating the year is unavoidable.»
You can, you as well, bring your contribution to one of the GoodPlanet Foundation bioclimatic school building site around the world and enable children to go to school: « I give for the bioclimatic schools ».
