Water Colors!

Zippora was out sick again today, but her teaching time was covered by Pamela, the P2 teacher, so no unexpected teaching today. 

In English I had the students working on an exercise in their exercise books and as they were working I was calling students over to do water color painting.  The kids here absolutely love drawing and are so artistic, so I wanted to let them try painting.  With my four sets of watercolors, each student was eventually able to paint a picture.  I asked them each to paint a person wearing at least three items of clothing, so then the following day they could label the clothing.  They really enjoyed painting.  One of the boys, Keneth, was in the first group of painters and he stayed and painted up until the last group of painters was finished.  It was too cute that I didn’t even have it in me to ask him to stop! 

Trying out water colors for the first time

Keneth, who painted all class period!

Before the math lesson began, I had the kids gather in a circle and practice our greeting again today.  Then for math I introduced the next lesson as was laid out for me to do in the math book, adding money.  I figured that now that my students were doing better with number recognition I could start to introduce this.  So I introduced adding money using the counters and had some of the kids help me.  Then I set the kids off to work so I could get a better sense of where they were at with addition (I had never seen them do any number work at this point).  And because students never ask questions if they don’t understand, I had about 15 of the 20 exercise books returned to me completely wrong.  Pamela passed me as I was walking out of the classroom and could sense my confusion/frustration.  So I explained to her what I was teaching and then asked if the kids knew how to add the numbers I was trying to have them add (50, 100, 200, 500, 1000-because these were the money values they were supposed to be adding), and she said no.  In fact, she said all they knew how to add were numbers that added together to make ten.  I was in shock.  I asked her how the curriculum expects me to teach them how to add such big numbers in a ONE day lesson that they have absolutely no previous experience with.  To this she did not have an answer.  In the back of my mind I kept repeating Dr. Gillian’s words, “Don’t let the curriculum bring you down.” Hmph.  

Godwin's exercise book

On a lighter note, one of my kids put a big ol' smile on my face today.  I was reading through the students' exercise books when I cam across Godwin's.  Godwin is a sweet little boy who struggles quite a bit in English.  But even when he is struggling and working with me, he still has a big grin on his face.  Anyways, the students were supposed to write what someone was wearing and what color it was (per the textbook).  And Godwin clearly did what a lot of the students here do, grab a colored pencil or crayon that is the color that they want to write and write down the name since they don't know how to spell the color words.  As you can see, Godwin wrote, "He is wearing a hat. It is Crayola" (because he was clearly looking at a Crayloa crayon).  And he went on to write "They are Roseart."  Bless his heart.  I brought a color poster in the next day so the students could use this instead of the crayons.