In this weeks blog Mark, our designer, writes about working with internationally renowned Palestinian artist and friend of the Hands Up Project - Malak Mattar. And how her first foray in illustrating and writing a Children’s book came to be.

In this weeks blog Amanda Avison writes about how inspirational Palestinian students gave her the confidence to try something new in the ESOL classroom.

For many years now the students and teachers of Palestine have been at the forefront of innovation in performing theatre online. Last year was no exception of course, and despite the pandemic (perhaps because of it!) we saw a new sub-genre of Remote Theatre being developed, where students could perform in the same play from multiple locations. We came to call this new form Lockdown Theatre.

To mark the UN day of friendship we have a lovely post by our brilliant and most active volunteer in Argentina, Tere. And don’t forget to tune in tonight at 8pm Palestine time to see Tere's and Haneen’s students in action in a live lockdown theatre performance of ‘Unity’ (with a few surprises too!)

World Doll Day may be over, but it's never too late to share the joys and moments of your special doll or puppet. Volunteer Manuela Kelly Calzini invites you to share stories - real or imagined - of your travelling dolls!

We are all facing a pandemic, each one in our own country. Everybody is at home, it is not possible to travel or visit a new place, and it is pretty hard to make new friends. Is it? Not for us!

In today’s blog, Palestinian teachers Haneen Jadallah, Rana Musallam, Amal Mukhairez and Samir Salama talk about their experiences presenting on a variety of topics at the 54th IATEFL conference.

Weathering the storm. Dwelling in positivity. These names refer to different phases of the University of Stirling’s Separated in Scotland research project on supporting separated migrant children in times of crisis. The Hands Up Project were invited to become one of the project partners.

We’ve restarted our weekly drop in sessions for Remote Theatre. These take place every Wednesday at 3pm Palestine time and they’re open and free to any teacher with some experience to come along with some of their students to rehearse a remote play. Please let us know if you’d like to take part.

This week we have a special post written by Nguyễn Duy Khang, Senior Lecturer at Can Tho University in Vietnam, and one of the participants on the recent Remote Theatre course that Nick ran for Vietnamese teachers.

This weeks blog post is by Rida Thabet, UNRWA Education Specialist in Gaza and Hands Up Project Trustee

Remote theatre (and its later variant Lockdown theatre) was born and bred in Gaza. So we invited some remote theatre specialists from there (Amal Mukhairez, Haneen Jadalla, Rinan Jamal and Soha Isleem) to come along and watch the final performances and provide some feedback.

The last year has not been an easy one. We have all had to adapt, to question our habits, change our routines, in short to look at almost every aspect of our lives and wonder if they can somehow be done differently.

Rereading some of the “oldie but goodie blogs”, I came across this one and thought how well it could work in some of the Zoom sessions that I’m doing with students connecting from home. Most of the activities suggested here would work in online groups, using a combination of breakout rooms and simple adaptations. In fact, I think I’ll try some this week..