Teacher Training

We have planned a nursery curriculum based upon the Gambian Early Child Development Curriculum and hope to give support our teachers, by providing suitable voluntary teachers and teaching assistants as often as we can.  These can be members visiting The Gambia on short term holidays or volunteers on longer stays.  Assistance is always welcomed to help support our teachers.

GETS’s curriculum focus is on correctly spoken English, with good comprehension, well formed writing and competent reading.  In Maths, the aim is to foster an understanding of number value instead of the usual chanting.  To carry this out, our teachers must have the resources and delivery skills to obtain what we are aiming to achieve.

GETS always welcomes English speaking volunteers to attend our schools as a classroom assistant to help all our teachers improve their spoken English, correcting their diction and pronunciation whilst extending their vocabularies. Volunteers can also play a big part in helping both the nursery children and the skills students to gain fluency in English by talking to individuals, or a small group of children, about their work they are doing, playing games with them such as snap and dominoes, or helping them to do jigsaws.

Often no previous teaching skills are needed for this BUT volunteers with teaching practice are of great benefit in helping our teachers to produce teaching support resources and showing them how to use them in and out of the classrooms.

The nursery curriculum is divided into teaching weeks so that longer term volunteers can be primed with the core teaching objectives for their time in our school. Volunteers could spend some of their time preparing relevant resources and some of their time in the classrooms.
 

GETS is funding two of our present nursery teachers to attend Gambia Teacher Training College in order to obtain their Early Child Development Certificate. This course lasts three years and takes place during school holidays.