The late lamented Simon Greenall, as well as being one of the authors of English for Palestine, was a huge supporter of ELT in general in Palestine, and in particular of The Hands Up Project.
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This week's post is by Becca Young of Virginia, USA. She's been a HUP volunteer since July 2019 and currently does a Facebook live storytelling event at 5pm Palestine time every Tuesday.
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This week we have a post from Sue Piper. Sue's been volunteering with Hands Up for two months now and does a wonderful Facebook live storytelling session for younger kids at 10 am Palestine time every Wednesday. Over to you Sue!
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'Show and Tell' has become one of the Hands Up project's core online activities. It's fun, communicative, and potentially very motivating for learners, especially if it involves interaction between young people who live in different contexts around the world.
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This week we have a post from my very good friend, our advisory board member in Gaza and UNRWA education specialist, Rida Thabet.
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This week we have a post from Hands Up Project volunteer and professional storyteller, Michael Loader. Over to you Michael.....
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'When people are aligned to their purpose, when the gap between values and behaviours closes, what people experience is a stream of ease' (Lewin 2000)
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This week we have a blog post written by long term Hands Up Project volunteer, Ashraf Kuhail. Ashraf is a very committed member of our HUP community, a brilliant teacher (and newly appointed supervisor) and one of my best friends in Gaza.
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Last week we published the names of the 18 winning plays of this year's remote theatre competition. This week we're publishing this very moving piece by Ana Begovic, one of the 70 judges who had the unenviable task of having to choose her favourite plays.
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After much deliberation and extremely difficult decisions by the panel of over 70 judges from around the world, we are very proud to announce the 18 winners (listed alphabetically) of the 2020 Hands Up Project remote theatre competition. We would like to offer our huge congratulations to them all.
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So finally in the midst of a world crisis, and after much deliberation and agonising decisions by the judges from around the world we are almost ready to announce the 18 winning plays of the 2019/2020 Hands Up Project Playwriting competition.
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There's no doubt that the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic has thrown education around the world into chaos. According to UNESCO, 85% of the world's learners are not going to school right now. This means more than one and a half billion children are stuck at home!But as we know, out of chaos there can sometimes arise incredible creativity, especially where Palestine is concerned.
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For anyone who missed last Saturday's Facebook live session about the history, the present and the future of the Hands Up Project.
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This post is by Haneen Jadalla, teacher at Asma Prep girls UNRWA school, Gaza
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Because of schools being closed in Palestine we can't do any of our regular link HUP ups via zoom so, until the situation changes, we're doing 3 Facebook live sessions a day from our Facebook page
The sessions are for Palestinian kids and they can access them from their own homes while they can't go to school. Here's the timetable.
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I was so looking forward to going to Gaza on Sunday to participate in the conference 'Creativity and Critical Thinking in ELT' organised by our advisory board member in Gaza, Rida Thabet. There were going to be lots of talks and workshops about this theme by Palestinian teachers, supervisors and education specialists and I was going to be doing a short talk myself called 'The power of story'.
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The other day I was doing a very short session with Haneen Jadalla's drama group at Asma Prep B Girls UNRWA school Gaza when Haneen suddenly announced that two students would like to perform a poem to me.I love it when these kind of impromptu things happen in the sessions and what a great poem it was - by the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish.Here's the text of it.
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When we do zoom sessions in the Hands up Project, we generally try to build in activities for students to do before the sessions (as preparation) and after the sessions (as a follow up). This is a great way to keep the students engaged with English for longer, and to make the online link ups very meaningful and student-centred.
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Zoom is the platform of choice for our online sessions with young people in Palestine and Jordan. One of the reasons for this is that it's really easy to record everything that happens on both sides of the webcam.
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If you go to this playlist on youtube you'll find lots of ideas for things that can be done in online sessions with the young people that we serve. But there aren't so many examples there of whole 45 minute or one hour sessions (apart from this brilliant example by Alex and Sahar) Our new volunteers understandably have lots of questions about what a whole session might look like?
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