Chekechea Day 2

Today was my second day working at the Kindergarten. As I was walking to work, I came across 2 of the students, Tito and Melania. We walked the rest of the way together. Melania was so sweet. She held onto my hand the whole way and was next to me a lot in the classroom as well. We started off the day with circle time as usual. Today, Usto (the head of the education department) was in the classroom. Seeing him with the kids was amazing. He is so incredibly great with them. During circle time, he got into the middle of the circle and was teaching the kids how to say; “My name is…” in English. He had them repeating it after him until they got it and then he went around asking everyone “What is your name?” and they had to reply. For the most part the kids got the hang of it. He then sang the song Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes to try and teach the kids body parts in English. After that, he moved on to eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. It was really fun to watch all the kids.

            After circle time, I observed the classroom again. I paid special attention to whatever Usto was doing because it seems like he really knows how to work with kids. I found one of the activities he did with Twiloo and another little boy very interesting. The kids had around 8 blue 3-D shapes that were all different. For example, a cube, a sphere, a pyramid, etc. They also had pictures of different objects that were shaped like the blue 3-D objects. The kids had to look at the picture, figure out which shape it was similar to, and put it in front of that shape. It was really neat to see the kids working and trying to figure out which shape the pictures looked like.

            Usto then took 4 kids aside to do a math lesson with. Every student had a chalkboard to write the problems on. They started off with 1+1, then 2+1, 3+1, 4+1, 5+2, 6+2, and lastly 7+2. For each problem, the students would first write it out on the chalkboard. They would then use beans as a counter to try and figure out the answer. They would put however many beans equaled the number underneath the number. So for 5+2, they would count out 5 beans and put them underneath the 5, and then count out 2 beans and put them underneath the 2. After that, they would count the beans all together to come up with their answer. For the most part, the kids really understood it. The main problem they sometimes had was that they would write their numbers backwards.

            Another fun part of my day was towards the end when the older kids had a Swahili lesson. They separated the older kids, who will be going into Standard 1 next year, from the younger kids. The younger kids got to continue the day as usual, completing an activity of their choice. I decided to stay in the room with the older kids to see what they would be learning. They had a small Swahili lesson. They began by writing out the vowels: a, e, I, o, u. Afterwards, they were instructed to write: ba, be, bi, bo, bu. Then cha, che, chi, cho, chu and lastley da, de, di, do, du. After they had written all of that, they moved on to actual words using those syllables. The teacher would say a word out loud and the students had to write it down. For example, bao or baba. I sat in between Tito and Melania during this exercise. I was so impressed by Melania’s work. Her handwriting was very neat and she did everything almost perfectly. I think I only had to help her once when she missed a letter in a word. She is definitely very smart.

            After work, I came back to the house for lunch. We had a delicious Sheppard’s pie. It was definitely a lot better than the chipsi we had for lunch yesterday! We then hurried over to Swahili class. Some secondary school students, who live in the house where we were having class, were watching through the window. Paulo told them not to watch through the window and that if they wanted they could come inside. He then quickly put them to work by making them come up with sentences. It was very funny actually. The students were a little bit shy and at first would barely talk. They still were at the end, but they ended up talking some. It was actually nice to have “an audience” during class so we can practice being comfortable talking in front of people. He made us talk about our family out loud to them and I felt pretty comfortable with that. I think that being in the kindergarten will help me become more comfortable because I do talk to the kids. I don’t know how much I will really be in the classroom though from here on out since I will probably be starting to work on the tasks that they want me to complete. Hopefully I will get to be in the classroom though. I really enjoyed being in there and getting to help with some lessons today.

            We met with Justin and Paulo afterwards to discuss our workload for school and tell them which ones we need help with. Hopefully this won’t be too much work and we really will be able to enjoy our time here. I think we will be okay. Education is the only class where I have to e-mail my assignment every week. So that is the one that I really have a deadline for. Of course for MCDP I of course have to stay on top of it because we have a big assignment for each week. However, for History, the questions are really easy and won’t take much time at all so I don’t have to stress about those too much.