Saturday, September 18, 2010

Miss. Rae is teaching. Miss. Rae has been teaching all day

First let me say thank you to everyone taking the time to donate to the Girls Leadership Camp(camp glow) and for the interest in pen pals! You can still donate to the camp through the PeaceCorps website and let me know if you want to be a pen pal! This week was crazy busy! Wednesday I co-lead a community training. This week was about my role and expectations as a pcv and the concepts of development and sustainability.Thursday i taught 3 classes and had 2 meetings all before 11:30am! Friday was open day, think parent teacher conference! But it was a good week even found a new carpenter and tailor this week. The new carpenter was cheaper and is less busy so maybe just maybe by halloween ill be sitting in a chair and not on a jerry can. The tailor is pretty good. I ordered a skirt and a dress from her. Of course they are made from chitenge material. I love both my skirt and my dress but it looks like I need to ride my bike more and fry my soya less! So on thursday I taught all 3 classes by myself all grade 9. I co-planned 1, talked about the other and the 3rd class that was really just for fun. The 1st class was a 80min english comprehension for 9b. The subject was our favorite animals and the passage was about my favorite animal the giraffe. It went well and they did a good job with the lesson. They also wrote about their favorite animals. Their stories were fun to read. In 9a we worked on structure in English. The lesson was on present continuous and present perfect continuous(hince the title of this post). Role play/acting was involved in this lesson and they loved that! They had to create sentences using our new tenses and they got all fancy on me. They really tried, I was proud of them. I continued teaching English when I realized (after the pupils pointed it out and begged me to stop teaching English..hehe) that the period was over and it was time for Religious Education (RE). The teacher was out so I asked them if it was ok for me to teach RE and they said yes. Id never taught RE before and didnt know where to start. We spent approx. 2mins reviewing their previous lesson on sexual feelings but I switched topics because I knew where that was heading! I started by asking them their thoughts on spirituality and religion just to get their opinion. They then started discussing religious text. They told me all the ones they knew and I added 4 noble truths just to see if theyd heard of it. This lead to questions about Islam. We then created a "characteristics chart" of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. For each faith we discussed: phrophets, name of the creator and the meaning of the name, who wrote the text and the language, place of worship and name of worshippers etc. It was AMAZING! They filled in what they knew and I helped with the rest. The topics came from their questions. The whole class was based on their questions and interest. HANDS DOWN THAT WAS MY FAVORITE CLASS/LESSON SO FAR! (Also partly due to the fact that I knew the answers to their question without looking at notes or a book!) I even had 7 pupils come to me during their break to ask me MORE question about the 3 faiths and Buddhism/4 noble truths. Ah cisuma sana! Ill teach that class until the teacher comes back next month. For a Hendrix update: Hendrix is a girl! Long story but my puppy is a girl and her name will stay the same. She had her 1st visit with the "vet" and she did well except for using my hand as a chew toy! The pigs near my house gave her maggots in her paws but shes all better now. She has started staying on a chain when Im at school so she stays out of trouble and doesnt reck my house. All is well this side and Ill be traveling to Kasama next week for a workshop and to visit other pcv's sites. LOVE YOU ALL! P.S. I hate ants and the mouse in my roof! Ants are much worse here and come out of no where and the mouse is annoying and keeps getting louder! T.I.A! AMAPALO...

2 comments:

  1. Hi. My name is Nate Bloss, and im a pcv in Namibia. Im about to finish my two years; myself and 3 friends are planning on doing some traveling. We were wondering if you could help us answer a few questions about Zambia. Right now we plan to go up through the caprivi strip and spend a few days in livingstone around december 14th. After this we need to make our way to lake malawi by december 23rd. I have 4 questions:

    What can we do in Zambia, particularily in the south?

    Are there any nice cheap places to stay on the route from livingstone to malawi?

    We may end up just sticking around livingstone for a while and going to malawi at the last minute. How long will it take to get from livingstone to the malawi border if we want to do it as fast as possible?

    Can we free hike in Zambia?

    Thanks,
    Nate

    ReplyDelete
  2. Forgot to give you my email. natebloss@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete