The abacus made by students at Breckenbrough School particularly fascinated many of the teachers who attended the two-day training course led by David Pointon.

"We did a whole session on using the abacus," said David. "We did some Braille maths and different methods of pre Braille maths. One or two of the teachers were very interested and wanted to take it further. We discussed all sorts of further methods and ways of using it."

He had taken ten abacus with him which meant that most o the itinerant teachers received one to use in the schools they visited. These teachers are employed by the Integrated Education Programme (IEP) to assist blind and visually impaired children who attend the government high schools in the district around Banjul. David does plan to provide more abacus.(Below - David showing the head teacher, Ali Sallah, the abacus made at Breckenbrough School)

During the course David  showed the teachers  how to conduct functional visual assessment and introduced the magnifying glasses (donated by Hilco of  Hawes), teaching aids and toys that the Dales Team had delivered. The teaching aids included raised diagrams used in Maths and Science lessons.

With the toys the teachers were asked to identify which areas of the curriculum they could teach using them. "They were very good at that," commented David. "They took it to enormous lengths. They covered the whole curriculum. They were very imaginative in their ideas."

He added that although the toys won't be available to the itinerant teachers the objective of the exercise was to take any piece of gear that may be lying around and use it as a teaching aid. This would provide blind or visually impaired children with tactile, physical experience rather than just working in the abstract all the time.

Below: The teacher training sessions including the teachers assessing the toys.Photo of David P by board by David Milner. All other photos by Ken Nicholas.