Construction work at our school
Since buying our school site in 2014 we have been busy building our new school.  We’ve had lots of help to build the new classrooms and other structures from individual supporters, families, and groups from universities, schools and companies.

In particular, we received 2 large donations specifically for building the new classrooms.  One of these was from an individual supporter and the other came from one of our partners, PURE! Foundation in The Netherlands, who selected Treak as their project to support in 2017.  In addition to PURE!’s fundraising, they also received matched funding from The Wilde Ganzen (Wild Goose) Foundation in The Netherlands.  The main buildings are now finished and we would like to thank all concerned.

    

We still have plenty of work to do including constructing a new playground and playground equipment, designing and laying out a large mosaic over the remaining hard areas, building new toilets and a shower, constructing a multi-use workshop for the garden and for our recycling programme “A Rubbish Idea!” (see below) and landscaping the site.

Young Learner Programme
This is built around our English classes and also includes wider topics such as arts & crafts, geography, PSHE, and basic science, maths and IT.

We offer English classes at four different levels for children and young adults who try to improve their English for better job opportunities in the tourism industry in Siem Reap.

Our head teacher Dara is a strong believer in methods such as learning by doing, and encouraging class discussions and questions. He coaches and encourages the teaching staff in these methods.

Children’s Programme (formerly the Nursery)
Our nursery classes provide early years education for almost 100 pre-school children.  These classes are targeted at the poorest families to encourage engagement in education.  Parents in such families often have had little or no opportunity to go to school themselves, and don’t always see the value of education for their own children.  The lessons are a mixture of Western style learning through play, and more formal sessions that are designed to prepare the children for government primary school, which itself is much more formal than Western styles of education.  Providing the Children’s Programme can also allow parents to work and free up older siblings so they can go to school.

Library
We are very fortunate to have a pleasant and well stocked library.  It contains picture dictionaries and encyclopaedias, Khmer storybooks,English storybooks, and bilingual Khmer-English books which are very popular and useful for teaching English to the children.  The library is a key resource as many of the children don’t have a single book at home.  They are all hungry for the opportunity to read.  All the books have been donated and we are always looking for more books to fill our shelves!

Plastic Bricks, “A Rubbish Idea!”

This innovative programme takes waste plastic and incorporates it into bricks.  We then use the bricks to build toilets in the village for families who don’t have one.  We now wish to build a workshop and storage area for the programme and any help to fund this is much appreciated.

Community Garden
At the side of our centre we have established a small community garden with the help of the villagers.  We grow all sorts of vegetables and flowers and the resources of our garden can be useful in many different ways:

• help to train villagers in sustainable practices
• educate people about more nutritious food and how to grow it
• demonstrate how to grow food with little or no land
• emergency money to villagers in need can be given in return for help in the garden
• provides employment for villagers to look after the garden
• improved soil through composting has the potential to produce a surplus of vegetables to sell to local hotels/restaurants