Sunday was my birthday! We went to Cape Town by train which took a little more than an hour. There we did some shopping and I got my dad a present. Then we ate at the food court and I enjoyed a falafel wrapped in pita bread. After a few more hours of shopping, we went back to Gordon’s Bay where we watched “The Notebook.” Then we celebrated my birthday with chocolate cake which was delicious and my favourite kind. It was a great day!

Monday

I just got back from school. It was exhausting as usual. During the one to ones, we went over the marvelous me sentences which we wrote last week and decorated them. Then we went over multiplication tables. I had them do as many as they could in a minute and then do 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s and 11s times tables and taught them the rules to those so that they could get faster. Two of my boys knew all those so we moved on to harder ones. I’m going to have to think of better ways of teaching them multiplication because they’re still counting and that takes quite a while.

The reading focus groups were kinda a mess today. The first group finished reading the book and then we had questions for them to answer about challenges they had faced and how they overcame them and we were met with blank stares. We provided dictionaries but still it didn’t seem to help. One girl Amanda was probably the worst. I asked her if she understood and she just said I don’t understand and when I asked her what she didn’t understand she didn’t say anything. It was incredibly frustrating. Only one of the students understood the concept and started writing sentences. Our goal was for them to all write ten sentences and like I said only one was able to write a few sentences. Today at our project meeting we discussed it and I think we’re going to try something more simple since our original plan didn’t work. The second group was also pretty bad. The one girl Charity is still struggling a lot and it was still hard to keep the other students in line. I had to tell them several times about keeping quiet but it didn’t seem to sink in.

The workshop however was really good, surprisingly good actually. We divided our 15 learners into four groups and each teacher had a different book to read that dealt with our theme of animals. My group read The Lonely Giraffe and answered questions while they were reading. It went really well and then once they were done, I got another group to read aloud and they did really well. After the reading focus groups, it was definitely the boost I needed. Now I’m at home trying to keep myself from just going to bed right now. The weekdays are exhausting.