LESS THAN 2 WEEKS!

Laundry Bins

The house

Wow I can't believe we have less than 2 weeks left. With that noted, we have split up and assigned the gifts we would like to give to the people we have appreciated and meant here. As well I have started to give away some of the stuff I am not going to need anymore, such as girl products, batteries, jewelry, and clothes. I also have been trying to take photos with each of my students, including a class photo! See this one below! Today I also did my final batch of laundry before I leave! I am really hoping I won't have to do it again, because I know upon my return to my family I will have to re-wash everything anyways. If I have never explained the laundry, I will now. So what I do is get three buckets and fill them half full of water. The water comes from these yellow jugs (see photo) and have to carry them to where I do the laundry and pour them in the buckets. I use the first bucket to soap and drench my clothes; from here I rinse the clothes three times in water! It is a lot harder than it looks and takes about an hour by hand. From there you also have to wait all day for the things to dry and hope that it doesn't rain on your clothes. Not knowing the exact weather is quite hard for planning things. Unfortunately it has not rained in three days in Kasese… this is good for my laundry plans but the native’s crops will suffer if rain does not come soon. So please keep them in your thoughts and wish for rain!

 

P6 Class Photo! 

This week in class I felt really proud of the work being done in my classroom. First I started to integrate reading into my students’ Dictionary unit. The way I am incorporating the books at the moment is having the students copy down words they are unfamiliar with in their reading logs. From here my students learned six steps to defining the word in the context of their clues. The steps included:

Context Clues Work

1. Write the sentence from the book with the words in it.
2. Guess the meaning of the word
3. Look up the meaning in the dictionary (Looking up is one of the skills required to learn by the curriculum).
4. If there is more than one definition, choose which one fits the context of the book.
5. Write a new sentence using the word.
6. Sketch a picture of the word.

This process, worked really well for a majority of my students. I felt as if setting up in this step by step process really allowed for students to dig deeper into how to understand texts and dictionaries. When assessing the students’ work, in which they each had to do this process with 3 words, I would say only 2-3 words were not used correctly when rewritten in a new sentence. I hope to continue to intertwine promoting reading and the required curriculum of reading. I say promoting reading, because it is not a part of any of the curriculum I am suppose to teach. I want my students to learn to learn on their own and enjoy texts. So now I give them 10-20 minutes each day for individual reading and I circulate through the students to read with them. I also promote the idea that the students should read what they like and when they do not like a book to find a new one. The students have also gotten the opportunity to leave our classroom and read all over the grass or on chairs or in the library during this time. Although a short time, I hope that each day the students begin to see the wonders of books and enter the reading zone.

My Students Reading the Leaders from the USA

Group Work Final Draft

In math class, I had to re-teach about the special angles and feel like they finally have reached a point of understanding with the topic. Tomorrow I will spend using my period to finish this topic before moving on to constructing perpendicular lines given a point. On Thursday and Friday, the students worked in small assigned groups. I had noticed during group work, student rarely use one another for talking about the content. So I decided to have the students only turn in one set of answers per a group. After presenting this to the groups and explaining that if one person does all the work and something is incorrect, they all get the answer wrong. I suggested that the within the group, the members talk with one another and make sure they have the correct answers. The groups transformed! Students began to look to one another for how they did the problems and worked together to finish the final set of solutions! I was really proud of the students for working together and out of the four groups there were a total of only 3 incorrect answers! I hope that this promoted team work and for students to view one another as resources for each other.

My Student Arnold playing against the Deputy Headmaster
in Soccer

Friday after school, there was also a teacher versus student soccer game! I did not play because I do not know how to play soccer, but I designated myself as official photographer. It was neat because many of my students played! So I was really rooting for the students to win, which they did! It was so neat to see some of students that I did not know well doing something they appeared they enjoyed! Today we are also getting four Canadians who are coming to the school to coach the student team I saw on Friday in soccer. The Canadians are also organizing a tournament amongst schools in the area! I really hope I get to see my student play and hopefully win before I depart.

One of my students is a twin! Here
is a family photo of them.

Outside of the classroom this week, we visited the local natural hot springs in the area. The water was super hot and I did not take a liking to it. There were many people there bathing and relaxing with friends. We went there with Enoch and his friend Loice. Afterwards we went to celebrate Loice’s birthday at her home. She brought out foods and drinks for the six of us. It was nice to sit down at a person’s house and just socialize at a table. I feel like many times we do not get this opportunity. This also inspired me to want to meet my students’ families. I wish I had more time here to meet the ones I could, but I am going currently reaching out to one family to visit them before we leave. I hope that they will take us, because their son is also in Heather’s class. I hope to find out on Tuesday if they will let us meet them! Part of being a teacher for me is to understand the families of my students or their background. With most of my students boarding, I am not able to meet their families, but I hop when meeting families I can see the value of education and family a family has.

Hot Springs in Kasese

The beautiful Rain Forest during Chimp Tracking!

The latest attraction of my week was chimp tracking. So I was fairly excited for this opportunity but after an hour of doing it, I knew it wasn't really my thing. Chimp tracking basically became I hear chimps somewhere and then start to walk in that direction off the trails and through the rain forest. I loved seeing the forest, but did not enjoy the fact that no one told me that I was suppose to wear pants and then my legs got cut up… I was not too happy with the off trail walking at that point. This was one for the fact that my legs were getting covered in unknown vegetation and that it depletes the conservation efforts that people make to protect our natural environment. I felt as if I was going against what I promoted all summer and the idea of Leave No Trace! The worst part was when we would find the chimps, within two minutes they would be gone and we would start chasing them again… I also did not get a very good picture. Although on the way home we saw 4 elephants! 2 of which were crossing the street and we got to see them moving pretty close to our location!

Well off to greet the Canadians soon! 

Xing Elephant Crossing