Habari Sana

Habari san! (I hope you are well)
I am very well after a very eventfull week. after all that stress i didnt get to teach on tuesday becuase i started the morning with some intresting projectile vomiting. it was just too early for bran flakes. Ive now found to marmite, and im sticking to it religiously! After a good rest on tuesday i was back up to full health and raring to go on wednesday. Arrived in good time and sat with much anticipation in the class room eager to being standard 5 in kisololi. The first lesson we did introductions, my name is, i an from, i have so many sisters etc. It is truly amazing, their syllabus seems very advanced (this month we have to teach them possesive 's') and yet they trurly understand diddly squit. We are all just exasperated with what the teachers have been doing in the past few years (apparently dictation, nothing but).

It was a good lesson, in both schools becuase we got the measure of understanding and talent. it is VERY varied. There are at least two in each class that were going to have to teach to read and write, then there are others who really do understand and have amazing handwriting, AND SPELLING! We have tried to make lessons as interactive as possible, using group and matchin sentances excercises, which they absolutly love. The hard part is that its very difficult to explain to them what we want to do (but they do love our bizzare demonstrations!) but most of all, they write EVERYTHING down on the board in their books. This is very good of them, but when the starter involves matching pictures and words, and only three of them out of 30 have pencils, and they MUST use pencils to draw, and it takes each child about 20 mins to write it out, it does eat lesson time!

We've also been enjoying (? rach has) teaching 'sport'. Of course, we were expected to bring buckets of footballs asports equipment and the first lesson we were completely hounded by horrible snidy standar 6 and secondary school children demanding footballs. we will leave it along time before we introduce anythin like that me thinks. However, though it took them a while to understandf the concept of relays, they seem to really enjoy it. Duck Duck Goose goes down a treat (played it for 20 minuits!!)
very importatn to drink during these lessons, bith me and rach very almost fainted, expecsally when dealing with 150 kids!
right, times up
Talk to you soon!