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| Adding some decoration to the walls of the classroom! |
It has been a crazy few days for us here in Uganda. Let me
catch you up in the classroom! So, on Tuesday I introduced my class to their
writing assignment and the writing process. They have told me that they have
never written a paper this long before, which got me a bit nervous. I gave my students
a chance to rank hotel advertisements I found in our compound to use this as a
prompt for their writing. So for the past two days they have been writing a
lot! For some I think it was helpful to do some prewriting, but for others they
did not even look at their prewriting, which caused for much information to be
lost in their writing. I am surprised that in the sixth level they have not
written a paper with more than one paragraph and I have had to do much guidance
one on one with about half the students. Today as a mini lessons I talked about
using introductory sentences and had students read a variety of ones I had
found in texts that emphasis ways to start a paper. I handed the book to one student
to read about 5 or 6 words in question form. He stared at the paper for about
10 seconds and I knew he could not read the words…. This was one of my worst
teaching moments ever… I did not know his reading level and my cooperating
teacher comes and goes and we have not gotten a chance to speak about the
students’ abilities. So for the boy, I had to feed him the words to read to the
class and I felt terrible to put him on the spot. I found out later that day he
had only joined last term in the school and he was put in P6 because of his
age, while his English level is not up to pare to the rest of the class. I
spent much more of the class time guiding his writing. I would write parts of
sentences to get him started and allowed him to tell me what to write or to
fill in the rest of the sentences. I think this helped him start to understand
how to use the vocabulary we were learning about in sentence structure. I
honestly am so grateful for many schools in the states to have ELL specialist
or support staff. I had to spend much time with this student and could not keep
track of what many other students are doing. However, I know I made the right
choice. Yes tomorrow some of the students may not have their papers done
because they were fooling around, but with the student I worked with I feel
like I have helped a lot in the classroom today. A similar thing is happening
in math, I had a student who was absent for a whole week and now I am trying to
catch her up. Luckily yesterday and today I have had a chance to sit down one
on one with her while the other students are completing leveled math problems. I
am anticipating reading their papers and seeing their math work from the past
few days.
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| Me and some of my P6 Students! |
With more interactions with my students, I have got to know a
few of them more personally. We have also named the hen which comes in our room
for hours each day. They taught me the work “Ersire” which means crazy in their
regional language; this is what we named that hen! So now each time the hen
starts to roam into our room we announce that Ersire is there! It is a bit nice
to have a classroom pet… which lays eggs in our cabinet!
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| Lots of buckets to catch rain water |
Other exciting news….. For 3 days we had no running water or
electricity. The electricity thing was not too bad because really the only
thing that was different was no laptops and having to wear our headlamps from
7pm and on. The water made it quite difficult. It was easy to buy water to
drink, but we could not do dishes, laundry, showering, or flush the toilets. We
learned that many people go down to a local river to gather water when this
happens. It also started raining and Doreen ran through the house with buckets.
It took us a minute to understand that she was collecting water! Heather and I
quickly joined. I also took a shower in the rain because it had been almost 4
days since I showered!
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| Had to make this picture big! We found a place called Jambo in Kasese that makes some American food. Had to get Mac n' Cheese. It was so good! I know we have to wait a long time for food, however here we could see them cook and they only have one stove. So we became very understanding when we ordered about 5 different things and were at the restaurant for about 3 hours. |
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| Mi Jeung Cooking the Beans |
Monday our advisor Maggie came from the states to visit some
areas in Uganda and visit Rwentutu. It was strange to see a white person that
we actually knew in Kasese, but it was nice to catch up. She also brought us
some American food (like M & Ms, trail mix, Gatorade packs, and oatmeal
packs!). Then on Tuesday because she was
here, we invited our supervisor Enoch, Doreen, the assistant headmaster King
James, and Maggie to our compound to serve a dinner. Doreen was the main cook
and cooked for 3 hours preparing food! I helped basically cut a few things, but
she was the mastermind of it all! It was so nice to sit and relax with people
from school, I almost felt as if I was home again. The food was quite
traditional (see below for pictures) for food you find almost at any restaurant.
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| Sweet potato, Rice, Peas, Eggplant, G-Nut Soup, Matooke, Beans! YUMMM |
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| Rocking Badger Spirit at School Today! |
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