Happy 25th Birthday Derek! (10/3)

Derek and I

Happy Birthday to Derek! I sent him a birthday wish with a picture of a little boy named Derek that goes to Rwentutu and me.

I had the students line up tallest to shortest when we started
talking about the words taller and shorter.

My English lesson this morning went well.  We were continuing with health and hygiene and we played another game of charades.  Unfortunately, my math lesson did not go as smoothly.  In fact, it was pretty rough.  I was introducing the measurement unit today, which Katie also introduced in her classroom.  I talked to Katie during break and she told me what worked in her classroom, so I deviated from my lesson plan to try the things she did.  I should have known better, that my kids are not her kids, and my students have different needs.  The lesson was not structured enough for my talkative, rambunctious P1 students, so I ran into some issues.  A lot of it I recognize as my own teaching, but I was also having a new and unexpected problem in the classroom.  As I was teaching all of students seemed to be so distracted, more so than usual.  I was taking things out of the kids’ hands left and right.  Later on I discovered that every student in my class was writing down the name of everyone in the class and then tallying how many times they spoke in vernacular throughout the period.  I was appalled.  Why?!  How silly.  I asked them about it, but didn’t get any concrete answers.  I told them all that it needed to stop when I was teaching.  I asked my teacher about it later and she explained to me that she had jokingly told them they should do it and sure enough they did.  Grrrr.

I incorporated some movement and visuals for my students as a way to think about taller vs. longer. Here we are practicing taller.

Wilbert and his bird!

To keep things interesting, I was sitting outside during lunch with one of Katie’s P2 students and he asked me if I liked birds.  I kind of said oh yea they are fine, and then he told me he had one.  As I started to ask him what he meant (was it a pet?), he pulled a bird right out of his pocket.  I jumped up in shock.  I was dumbfounded.  “What are you doing with that bird in your pocket?”  “I am going to eat it?”  “Eat it?  You eat birds?”  “Yep.”  “Oh, how on earth did you catch it?”  “I just grabbed him.”  And with that I went to warn Katie that one of her lovely students had a bird in his pocket just in case he wanted to try and show her too.  Oh kids!

Right at the start of the games period one of the teachers called all the kids together for an assembly.  The kids gathered and the teacher lectured them in Lukunzo about how they need to have clean clothes and their heads shaved when they come to school.  So he sent all the kids home to clean their clothes and shave their heads, and if anyone came back without one or both of these things done by tomorrow, they would be sent home.  So with that, Katie and I were also sent home an hour early. 

The only excitement of the night was the ant colony that tried to invade our bedroom.  There were, without exaggeration, upwards of 200 ants all in a giant colony right on the wall outside our bedroom.  We used our cockroach spray, which doubles as ant killer (and probably just about anything else), and took care of them.  Although we were quite disgusted.