Week 6!!

By Anne Knowles

Wednesday 23rd of February 2011

Here we are at the end of week 6. We're feeling tired but we're getting more satisfaction from our teaching as we become more involved with our classes. The school has been undergoing some local exams this week, known as the Round Test which involves Standard 8 from several local schools meeting at one school to take exams in the main subjects. On this occasion it was Sekenani which meant that one block of classrooms was devoted to this exercise and Standards 5,6, and 7 doubled up. Organisation of the lessons was, at best, confusing and many classes seemed to spend a large part of the day untaught.

Leah and I have taken advantage of the opportunity to introduce our plans for Fundraising Day on March 25th. We plan that Standard 5, 6 and 7 should each perform a short play and a song. We have looked for material from Maasai folklore and sought the children's suggestions. We also plan to produce a booklet of their creative work. Simon has expressed a wish that Leah teach more Standard 6, 7 and 8 Social Studies and that I teach more Standard 5 English. This has yet to be confirmed, though. This shows a degree of trust in our teaching. We have given him our action plan although we have yet to receive feedback. Agnes was positive and supportive about it and we feel that having made progress with some of the more straightforward issues [water access, library, extracurricular activities] we should now push for some in-house teacher training, which could include positive behaviour management strategies.

On a personal level we have enjoyed teaching the pupils songs and games during their free time. Also we visited a Maasai teacher's home in a manyatta last weekend and received a warm welcome from his family. We were pleased to spend time with the pupils and staff on Saturday; there was a pleasant relaxed atmosphere as pupils were engaged in non-classroom activities such as making themselves and their dormitories clean and attractive and playing games.