Week 7 & 8

The internet has been down at the school this past week so I decided that I would just take a week off. But now that I know my mom is passing my blog link onto people, I will try to make the blog more interesting. The amount of teaching that I am doing has increased, I am teaching daily now and am involved in my usual tasks like drawing lines, passing out the lunch, and assisting students around the room. Some of things I taught this past week are short 'i' rhyming words, English (reading of basic nouns), and I taught a unit on light in environmental studies. For this I presented the children with pictures of different sources of light both artificial and natural. Then in groups I had the students explain an activity they could do with that light source. Then we categorized each type of light as either artificial or natural. This week we talked about the dangers of handling certain light sources and what could happen if we mishandled them for instance burns and fire outbreaks. I taught them about stop, drop, and roll, but with a class of 43 I could not have all of them do this so I had one student demonstrate. Then I taught them a song about fire that the head teacher knew. I am still feeling like I need more support from the other teachers when I am teaching. I know that I entered into a dysfunctional classroom with a struggling mentality of collaboration. This has made my experience very difficult because even though I have asked for help I am not getting the support I need.

After teaching reading this week, I decided that I would assess the students individually since they only read as a whole class. It took the whole day to have each student read two short passages that they had read the day before as a whole class. It really made me realize how many children can be left behind in such a large crowd. All I did was mark the words that were read incorrectly so I knew how many total words were read correctly. Some of the children could not even get through the first and shorter passage. I had planned that after reading I would have the students answer one comprehension question. If the student could not read the passage then I would read it for them while tracking the print and then ask the question.

This Friday we have parent teacher conferences which will be interesting since it is my first one from the teachers perspective. I really want to encourage parents to check and sign their children's homework. Many parents it seems take advantage of the fact that they are sending their children to one of the best schools in Ghana and then think they do not have to be involved in their child's education.

Since it is the midterm, we will be off of school on Monday and Tuesday. It is also independence day this weekend. So I am going to a celebration at the botanical gardens just outside of Accra. Otherwise I just hope to do some shopping and go to the pool since I will be leaving in just about 3 weeks time.