Boy, are we spending a lot of time working as volunteers here! T and I have a full load today; six hours of teaching between tutoring, English, and preschool. During tutoring this morning, we acted out “football” vocabulary, so the students were excited. This week has definitely showed us how basic we are going to need to get to reach all our students. Despite their ages, T and I will be going back to basic arithmetic and vocab/spelling for the kids, and some adults, too. Our morning ESL lesson was complete with a segment where students had to create infomercials for everyday products which were their vocabulary words. T and I modeled this of course, “selling” a few items, including a water jug, a church pew, and a backless chair. Preschool, surprisingly, is my favorite part of the day. I get to make up chants and games for them to do as we work on writing our letters and counting! Today was so adorable; the kids all cheered as they saw us walk into the room instead of their regular teacher! Their participation with the letter of the day, B, was impressive! Some students decided to be naughty today, too, so I got to try my hand at disciplining little kids who do not understand what I am saying. It was fun. J I am such a teacher. Our afternoon ESL lesson was spent a bit on spelling, and mostly on conversational skills. It was a lovely class period as we all sat out on a huge woven grass mat in the sun. J We had a lunch date today with D and the Director of the Lutheran Community Schools in Town to talk about visiting the two schools and possibly helping out the teachers there. I am excited to see their schools. Schools in Zambia go for five hours a day so that some children can go in the morning and some in the afternoon and the same classrooms can be used for different classes. I think of my kids at home, many of whom are in school for ten hours a day, twice what these children are used to. That blows my mind. About three hours of prep/planning is done daily to be set for teaching for the next day, and as we have no curriculum and the ages of our learners vary from two to thirty, it is not always the easiest to figure out what we want to do and what will help. As we have been told numerous times already, whatever work we can do will benefit those who attend our classes. In other news, here are some more tidbits from the day: this afternoon it was raining on one side of the building and not the other, we had a fish n chips dinner and I was so glad to see that the fish wasn’t staring at me, although the scales were still on….., our transition song for our kids to leave tutoring is “Hey Driver,” a lizard ran across the ceiling in my room tonight upside down and decided to spend the night somewhere…., I had TP hanging out of my nose from blowing my nose and didn’t notice it, a three legged spider crawled across the wall, M—our new friend who is our age—wants to take us out and show us around town soon, and as I always seem to find the huge spiders, I hear T’s voice say “Do you want to kill him now or later?”
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