When we think of a school, we think of desks, blackboards or dry erase boards, books, and more – we think of them as filled to the brim with the things needed for learning. But getting a school started from the ground up can be tough – when the structure is built, there’s still all the expensive furniture to consider.
The Rubondo Secondary School had a creative solution to this problem. They made an agreement with a nearby church that students would pick up the church pews on Monday morning and use them throughout the week, and then return them to the church Friday after school so that they could be used for weekend services.
But it’s a lot of work…they have to walk up a steep hill with the pews to get back to the school.
The pew system was working – but it was pretty time consuming. So we thought we might do something to help the school, and ensure that they had enough desks for all of the students to use.
We also wanted to make the classroom brighter and more exciting for the students, so we decided to paint all of the benches dark blue, light blue, pink or yellow!
The students loved the colorful desks, and they were excited that they wouldn’t have to schlep the church pews up and down the hill each week.
A volunteer with Alight told us earlier this week about a Ted Talk he had previously seen about how colors influence us.
“Exposing people to different colors activates different parts of the brain,” he said, “which means making a colorful space is a way to help energize people and get them to learn more. It’s a great idea to do for an office, and also to do for a school!”
