Service- Day 1 Brainshine school (7)

January 30th 2012,

Today was like a “workshop and practice” day,

We came to school at exactly 8:00 am and met up in Mrs. Osborn’s room.

First thing in the morning Mrs. Osborn gave us an hour to prepare and polish our lesson plans for the three days. Miguel and I went to the library he researched on the social studies our community, the different types of housing used in Kenya, as I photocopied coloring pages for the kids to cut and paste body parts in Swahili. At that moment we felt pretty confident with our contents. Later on, we had a tea break, then we went off to the elementary pre-k and kindergarten, we observed how the teachers interacted with each student, their techniques they used, for example I was going with the 1^st grade class to the library and one boy kept on stopping and causing chaos in the line (they were supposed to walk straight in line to the library) so the teacher just hold up her fingers and counted to three, this was a great technique of control as the boy quickly understood the warning and went straight in line without a word. Afterwards, some of us went to the music room with another class, some of us stayed and talked to Ms. Little the KG teacher, and took a look at her classroom and see if we could use any lesson idea at the brain shine school. After that we had lunch, then we met at exactly 11:20 in her classroom. Meanwhile we were given 10min to gather our plans and present them group-by-group to the rest of the class. 

When it was Miguel and I’s turn we began with our first class on Tuesday which was “our community”, we thought of printing out pictures of different types of housing in Kenya explain it to the kids then we will separate them into groups and give them building blocks to create their own ideal houses. The same day we have P.E we thought of having balls and hula-hoops. On Wednesday we have P.E and “our leaders” social studies to teach, we thought of searching Kenyan traditional leaders and explain the different types of leaders. On Thursday we have 2 Kiswahili classes to teach one is “Naming of clothes” for the 1&2 graders, we thought of doing a clothes line hanging paper clothing parts in a string and have each student name them in Swahili as well as English, the other one is “body parts” for the 3 graders, we thought of photocopying cut and paste body parts coloring pages and as the students are doing they will name the parts in Swahili after that we will learn a song on body parts. We were given few minutes to pick a lesson and teach it to the class. As all the groups including mine went, then later we talked about what they did well, what went wrong, and what didn’t seem interactive enough. 

In the end, we came up with the following objectives for the next three days while we are teaching: Know your role, be flexible, high energetic voice, make the kids participate more in what we are teaching, have a good pace and speed, and always define fancy words/vocabs. These were great objectives we as a class and Mr. Bismeyer and Mrs. Osborn came up with as most of us lacked these objectives during our first trial of teaching, for example Miguel and I got the energy, the pace and the kids participating but we lacked organization like who is going to say what and when. 

The goal for this trip is to have fun and learn, it’s like a great opportunity to be silly and exploring a whole new side of us.