We are finishing up our last school visits today with the school with the least resources and the school with the most (still very modest by our standards). It will be our second visit to the schools but the first time we will be working with the kids.
Imagine that the door to your classroom was made using a sledge hammer on the cement blocks and the only windows are slits in the wall to the outside. There is no power, no water, no bathrooms. The blackboards are just plain tired! The kids in this school are not sitting and whining, they are sitting on the edge of their seats and participating! Teachers are following the curriculum and there are just no excuses.
Our pictures do not reflect the darkness in these classrooms, but you can see the kids are happy to be there! The head teacher here is amazing - there are 4 grade groups and the blackboards are full of lessons. The children do a lot of group response and have each has their own well worn notebooks and a pencil (which doubles as a utensil at lunch).
We had kids from Lafayette, Mt. Olive, and the Sunday Schools at Branchville and APC complete a trading card for themselves - draw a picture on the front and write their favorite hobbies, sports, friend's names, etc on the back. The kids back in the US did a great job with a promise that we would have the children here do the same thing and trade them.
We were not sure how this was going to go over in this school, what could they say were their hobbies, etc? The teacher in the first classroom that we did this with did a great job of giving the kids ideas of what to write on the back (Enlgish was limited but once they got it, they took off with it). He made sure that their work was quality work (they put both first and last names, etc.) Here we are in the middle of a compound of one room concrete houses, a shared outhouse here or there (we saw some hilarious scenes of kids walking to school and doing group pees on the way), water may be a mile or two away, but for hobbies the teacher wrote reading, music, Mortal Kombat and FIFA 2012! What? Turns out that here and there there is a hut with electricity, a tv and a video game set up that people can pay to play!
The kids were so excited to look at the American trading cards, and once they got them they started trading them amongst themselves. They loved reading the backs about what our kids do (seems they all have soccer in common) and looking at their drawings! This turned out to be a great activity and we wished we had done it with more kids!
Of course this was not the only activity we did in this school. The smaller children made snails with tissue paper and glue (no googly eyes this time). Some kids had a great time licking the tissue paper and sticking them on their face. The middle kids made yarn pictures, which came out great and the older kids made silly band bracelets which they love. The grand finale was balloon rockets, where the kids count how many pumps it will take to get a balloon to go all the way across the room on a string or how many it will take to pop it. Either way, there was a lot of excitement that day for both students and teachers alike!
Of course this was not the only activity we did in this school. The smaller children made snails with tissue paper and glue (no googly eyes this time). Some kids had a great time licking the tissue paper and sticking them on their face. The middle kids made yarn pictures, which came out great and the older kids made silly band bracelets which they love. The grand finale was balloon rockets, where the kids count how many pumps it will take to get a balloon to go all the way across the room on a string or how many it will take to pop it. Either way, there was a lot of excitement that day for both students and teachers alike!
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