Khashuri School Supplies

I am currently working as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Khashuri, Georgia. If you're reading this, you probably know me or somebody else that knows me. If you are not famliar with the country of Georgia, please check out the Wikipedia page to get an idea of where this request is coming from. While the country is seeing fairly rapid economic growth, the schools are still lacking what many Americans would consider necessary supplies and classroom tools. I would like to raise a small sum of money to improve the English classrooms and to buy textbooks for the students whose families cannot afford them.

Books

The textbooks that they are using are designed for classes where most of the students are at the same level. Unfortunately this is not the case. It is a constant struggle to maintain the interest of the lower level students while still challenging the more advanced speakers. I would like to buy adaptatations of English novels for the students who are able to read well. Hopefully I will be able to create a small library of books of varying difficulties.

Technology

The textbooks that they are using could be very interesting for the students if they could utilize all of the features. There are a lot of listening activities and videos from American and British television shows. Unfortunately, there is only one CD player that is shared by all of the language teachers so often they skip the listening activities. There is no way to show the videos to the whole class, so they also skip the movies. All of the lessons are built around the videos, so I was hoping to buy a DVD player or small projector that can connect to a computer.

Classroom Tools

Some of the classroom have very old chalkboards that are really only polished pieces of wood. I would like to purchase a dry-erase board for the English classroom with a magnetic English alphabet for the younger children to practice. The Georgian alphabet is completely different from the Latin script that we use, and they don't have any tools to teach the young kids while keeping them entertained. Lastly, I want to buy some English posters to decorate the classrooms. Right now the walls are painted concrete and I woud like to put up some English verb tenses or some key vocabulary posters.

Your money can go a long way here and the students would really appreciate anything that we could provide for them. I want this to be a surprise when they come back from their winter break. So if you're in the holiday spirit and would like to help a school in need, I would really appreciate a small donation. I'll post pictures of anything that I get for them and I'll try to get some of the students' and teachers' reactions. Thank you!