What started out as a modest book lending program in 1995, has grown in response to PI families and children to include a growing number of community supported programs in diverse areas.

Leamos Juntos Yucatán

Leamos Juntos Yucatán, the literacy program of Proyecto Itzaes, currently provides beautiful, high quality children’s books and family literacy programs to six villages in Yucatán, Mexico. With your help we can bring the gift of books and family reading to more villages and enrich our programs for thousands of Yucatecan families.

In 2001, with an initial gift from the Kriewall Family Foundation, the Raising a Reader (RAR) program was first introduced to the families of Proyecto Itzaes in Chicxulub Puerto, Yucatán Mexico.

In 2006, we began a partnership with the Bring Me A Book Foundation to provide beautiful Spanish language and bilingual books for older children in our villages. This collaboration has provided libraries and parent training programs for PI families in six Yucatán villages to date with plans to add new villages each year. The partnership with Bring Me A Book will greatly enhance and build upon the foundation that Proyecto Itzaes has developed by working closely with the villages and committed individuals of the community.

Leamos Juntos Yucatán addresses the extreme poverty of the Maya village children and emphasizes a multilingual, multicultural approach to reach those most in need. These children often enter kinder without ever having held a book or developed basic pre-reading skills. Our take-home book bag program has successfully reached the toughest, most critical population in Yucatán—low income families in small villages where parents are poor readers or do not have reading confidence.

Learn more, watch a video

Read to Me.
A message from our Yucatán children (1:48)

In the past 14 years, as a measurable outcome of PI, the children of Proyecto Itzaes villages are continuing on not just to high school, but to the university and via the Leamos Juntos program, the level of literacy of entire villages has changed dramatically. PI Yucatán is a community effort and every learner at Proyecto Itzaes is also a teacher. This is reflected in the motto of the project: Ka’ambal U tia’al Ka’ansaj ::: Aprender para Enseñar ::: Learning in Order to Teach.

Environment Programs

In 2006/2007 Proyecto Itzaes launched our Science in the Village Program, together with our educational outreach partners; The Nature Conservancy Mexico, Pronatura, and with academic support from Professor Rodolfo Dirzo, Stanford University and UNAM. Working together with families from each community, the Science in the Village Program provides hands-on learning opportunities specific to each locale and encourages community members to record and archive (in Maya and Spanish) traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) .

Projects include:

• Traditional gardens in each village, including seed collection of species of concern and the archiving of TEK
• Interactive science curriculum
• Community initiated projects

For more information contact: Cindy Wilber at cwilber@stanford.edu

Learn more, watch a video

When I grow up, I want to be a scientist.
The Science in the Villages Program inspires a young student. (1:27)

Beach Clean Up

In 2004, Rotary International, Palo Alto & Los Altos CA Rotary Clubs together with Club Rotario Nuevas Generaciones, Mérida, Yucatán collaborated with PI in Chicxulub Puerto to initiate the Guias Ecologicas Program.

Proyecto Itzaes children and their families worked together with Rotarians to provide beach trash cans, illustrated to demonstrate organic or inorganic trash for the port village. PI beach clean ups have been valuable teaching and learning experiences for children, families and the entire community.

Proyecto Itzaes children and their families worked together with Rotarians to provide beach trash cans, illustrated to demonstrate organic or inorganic trash for the port village. PI beach clean ups have been valuable teaching and learning experiences for children, families and the entire community.

Cultural Preservation

The preservation of Maya culture is reflected in many Proyecto Itzaes programs and Maya language classes are an important part of PI curriculum.

Programs

• In Chicxulub Puerto, a cultural preservation project involving students and their elders has been underway since 1999. PI students have taped interviews (in Maya and Spanish) with their grandparents, aunts and uncles about local traditions and stories. These interviews are transcribed and archived digitally along with scans of old photographs and other historical materials.
• Children writing their own books in Maya and Spanish.
• In 2006/07, the Rotary project educated our communites about Type II Diabetes. The project included interviewing and then archiving information about traditional foods, fishing, and agriculture.
• To provide more children’s books that reflect the dominant culture, PI is producing Maya/Spanish books. The book, Jauna La Iguana y La Fiesta / X-Juana Juuj Yéetel Cha’an will be available soon

Health Programs

In 2006, Proyecto Itzaes in collaboration with the Palo Alto Rotary, Club Rotario Nuevas Generaciones Mérida, and Rotary International began a project in six Yucatán villages focused on preventing Type II Diabetes.

The diabetes project has provided technology resources (computers, printers, scanners, digital cameras and recorders and other teaching materials) to enable the middle school students of the community to complete a village wide health education project. Students are:

• Interviewing village elders about the food that they ate in their childhood and how those foods were produced
• Scanning and archiving old photos of milpas and family gardens
• Banking seeds from traditional food sources
• Interviewing each other to determine the most common foods eaten by middle school students today and where those foods come from
• Using the internet and other research resources to compare and contrast the nutritional values of their own current diet with that of their elders
• Writing recommendations for their communities about healthy nutrition and diets that help prevent Type II Diabetes

Special Education

Manuel was born prematurely and is blind. PI provides help for Manuel to be mainstreamed into the Leamos Juntos reading program.

In Chicxulub Puerto, PI has been serving families with special needs children since 1995. Volunteers in the community, specially trained, donate their time to help with special education needs that range from mild learning disabilities and difficulties with speech to more severe challenges like Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and more. Currently, 75 children are enrolled in the special needs program and funds are desperately needed to adequately provide much needed care and services.

In the village of Ixil, the special education program also includes classes in Braille and community support for the blind. Manuel was born prematurely and is blind. PI provides help for Manuel to be mainstreamed into the Leamos Juntos reading program with Braille versions of books and classes in Braille are now offered for community members eager to help.