I tutored Gertrude and Dalitso today. They’re two older kids and know English fairly well. This is the one group that Rachel and I have to split on – she has them Wednesday and I get them Friday. We worked on reading James and the Giant Peach. This book might be a little too high for them, but they want to keep reading it so I’m doing whatever I can to ensure comprehension. We drew pictures and looked up stuff on the Internet, including the trailer for the movie. They got really excited when I did stuff with the laptop, so I’m going to continue incorporating that into my lessons.
Next up was English with the ladies. Rachel and I started off the class by showing them PowerPoints of our family pictures. They loved them. I also think they were relieved not to have to start off class with a discussion activity J.
Class again went well today. They continue to open up and get more confident in their speaking skills. We did some of our usual activities as well as an oral test: I described a kitchen to them and watched them draw it out to see how well they listened. We worked on directions (right, left, etc.) as well as reviewed the nouns and verbs from our week. To close class, I asked the ladies to tell me what they learned this week and what they wanted to learn in the weeks to come. I asked them to honestly tell me how this week went – did they learn anything? Was it too easy or too hard? They really want to focus on being able to understand Americans when they speak English, so I’m going to work on more conversational/discussion activities next week as well as some more oral tests. Also, they told me they understand a lot of the basic vocabulary, but they need help using it in conversations. It was very insightful and helpful as I plan next week.
Afterwards, we met Pastor Chijoka, the man who is in charge of the two Lutheran community schools, Kaunda Square and Matero. We are planning on doing an in-service day for the teachers to help them incorporate different strategies into their classrooms, so we coordinated a day when we could meet the head teachers from each school to plan that out.
We discovered that while we were teaching this morning, Anne was busy making our lives very comfortable – my bed was made nicely and there were warm biscuits waiting for us when we got back. Needless to say, Rachel and I adore her.
The rest of our afternoon was spent going on a walk, eating dinner, and sitting outside enjoying the cool night air. We have a three day weekend (it’s Youth Day on Monday) so we made a list of some possible Lusaka sites we can visit. Overall, a pleasant, low-key day.
No comments:
Post a Comment