MAKE OUR DAY
ABOUT
Our Mission
📚 Established in 2014
🚸 Camps, Classes, and Scholarships
💪 Project Based Learning Curriculum
Make Our Day brings camps, classes, and scholarships to students around the world. Make Our Day initially started when our Founder, Teacher Katie realized that while traditional school might not be for everyone, learning is.
It is Make Our Day’s mission to instill a lifelong love of learning in students around the world through bringing them hands-on learning opportunities that relate to their interests, culture, and life experiences. Our camps and classes build students’ confidence and create competent, creative, critical thinkers. We believe that curriculum has to be relevant to the time and place our students live in. And most importantly, it has to bring joy. The joy is in the journey.
Our camps and classes have grown significantly in the past 10 years and with the support of donors, we are now able to put hundreds of students a year through our camps and classes as well as grant up to 15 scholarships per year.
Thank you, THANK YOU for all of the support from those donors who have been with us from the beginning and if you’re here reading about us for the first time, welcome! We would love to have you sponsor a student or volunteer with us.
Why Two Locations?
🇹🇭 Phuket, Thailand
🇺🇸 Aurora, Missouri
We as humans are only capable of seeing the world through the lens of our own experiences. It is our belief that students have to learn about the world through their
own personal experience of new places, people, languages, and cultures. Make Our Day plans to expand our students' range of experiences through deepening the connections between our American and Southeast Asian students.
As our students are getting older, we are working towards building opportunities for cultural exchange in which our students from Phuket could come stay at our school in Missouri and students from Missouri could go stay at The Good Shepherd in Phuket.
Our Founder
👩🏻🏫 Kathryn Dillman
🎓 Masters in Education
🙏🏻 200HR Yoga Teacher / Children’s Yoga
Sawasdee Ka & Bienvenidos. I’m Teacher Katie. In 2012 I decided to change careers and moved from Kansas City, Missouri to Thailand on a one way ticket. I became a teacher in the Thai public schools and was quickly reminded of the impracticality of the education that the average public school student receives. I remembered how bored I had been throughout school and saw that decades later, my students were feeling exactly the same.
I had the leeway to write my own curriculum for an English Program, so I did. I started offering free extra classes after school and on weekends where students were allowed to explore their own interests and learn language and number literacy through play, song, sports, dance, cooking, art, and more.
Having the freedom to learn in a different way outside of school not only made my students’ day - it made a difference. It made a difference in their confidence, in their performance at school, in the way they acted towards their classmates, and most importantly in the way they thought about themselves. When a child has a bad experience at school or is told they are a “bad” student, they start to believe that they cannot learn and that is a tragedy.
"If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid"
School may not be for everyone, but learning is. I founded Make Our Day to bring a unique, hands-on style of learning to those students who need it most and I believe we are doing that.
I love you munchkins. I love you donors & volunteers. Thanks for helping me raise the next generation of kind, creative, critical thinkers. All are needed to heal our world.
Our Curriculum
Make Our Day uses our own original Project Based Learning Curriculum
Teacher Katie writes all of the curriculum for Make Our Day and translates it when necessary with the help of our students. We use Project Based Learning so that anyone can jump in and contribute right away without any background knowledge or prerequisite language or skill requirement.
It’s important to our mission that all ages, abilities, and languages be able to engage in learning together. All projects are designed with student input and tailored to the interests of that student group. You are your own best teacher munchkins. Make Our Day is here to guide, encourage and support you in your lifelong love of learning.
Our Staff
It would Make Our Day to have you as a volunteer.
Make Our Day has no full time staff. This is a volunteer run organization. If you are interested in volunteering at camps and classes or if you have skills in videography, photography, marketing, or donor relations please get in touch! We often have as many as 20 volunteers from all over the world join us for our camps in Phuket. We cannot pay volunteers’ travel expenses to Thailand.
EXPLORE
OUR 2024 PARTNERS
