The third Top up Training of the year came to a successful end last week and was attended by all teachers, head teachers and Ghana Education Service (GES) officers. This one-day workshop introduced the participants to the next themes, Handas’s Surprise for KG1 and Traditional Tales for KG2, as well as the skills needed for story sharing in their classrooms and how to develop children’s imagination and confidence in telling stories. The workshop also explored the importance of story sharing in developing children’s vocabulary in both their local language and in English.

The participants were taken through the three key skills of story sharing; Imitation, Innovation and Invention. Using these skills the participants were asked to invent their own stories to share with the group. Some excellent stories were created, which made for a fun and interactive session.

We were delighted to have visits from the new Cape Coast Director of Education and the Deputy Director of Education for KEEA district during the workshop. The Cape Coast Director shared with participants her excitement to be working in a district where the Fast-track Transformational Teacher Training (FTTT) programme is being implemented on a large scale, after first hearing about the programme during a sensitisation exercise carried out by the FTTT team in her former district. The Directors thoroughly enjoyed the story sharing session during the workshop and were impressed by the overall organisation of the workshop. We are looking forward to taking the Cape Coast Director on some classroom visits in the coming weeks as this will show her all of the fantastic work happening in the classrooms.

The workshop was also attended by Spencer, our new Finance Manager and Manda Simmons who will be volunteering with our team in Ghana.

We would like to say a big congratulations to the FTTT team and OLA trainers for bringing to a close another successful training workshop, and medaase pa pa pa (thank you very much) to the participants for all of their excellent and interesting stories and contributions during the workshop.