Service- Day 2 Brain shine School (8)

Jan 31 2012

Today was “the big day”, we were both nervous and excited to teach the students at Brain shine school.

Early in the morning we set off to the school, but we came a little late and classes already began, so there was no time to take a mini tour of the school. Mrs. Eunice, the head mistress, welcomed us at the entrance, she introduced herself and the classes that were currently present, given that grade 3 and 4 were missing today, she went on about not fearing the children as they are sweet little angels who at first will be shy but later they will open up to us. Miguel and I was assigned to teach the kindergarten kids, which was a bit confusing as we only planned to teach P.E and S.st. to grade 3 so at that moment we had to teach the s.st lesson to the kindergarteners but on a lower level so they could understand and participate.

Today was challenging most of the time we didn’t know what to teach or had to re-plan what to teach as the schedules given to us was not what was being followed currently, nevertheless it was really fun Miguel and I really got along with the KG kids they were focused, hyper and mainly understood what we were telling them. We taught them Math- counting numbers, shapes, and recognizing colors, as well as Social studies- we talked about houses in Kenya then later they went off individually to build their own Lego houses. After that, we taught them English- reciting the alphabet along with words that go with the letter and sang songs. Last but not least, we read them books in Swahili and English they loved the “Mcheshi goes to the market” book  (they enjoy listening to stories very much) at the end of the story we asked them questions. They were so hyper and cheery. When it became too hot in the classroom we would tell them to make a line, then we would set off outside and continue our lesson in numbers, we did the “tap head” number they had to count everyone going around in circle, and “ball” number they had to hold the ball and count. These were great activities Miguel and I came up with.

Another challenge we had was that one of the kids was a “mini Paul” his name was Kariuki, at first we didn’t know what to do with him as he was creating chaos in the classroom, but thankfully Mr. Bismeyer was there, and showed us what to do, we took Kariuki outside the classroom where he had to stand there for a minute until we told him to come back in, and it worked.