I have to apologize for my lack of blog posts. It is so hard to write every day and then post every day! There is so much going on. I will do my best to rehash last week as well as the week before that because my last post didn’t even finish that week.
Thursday July 28th
I found out yesterday that I’ll be in the classroom starting on Monday. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m nervous about having lots of students all speaking Xhosa which I don’t understand. I’ll still be in Grade 6 which is cool because I’ll still get to see the students I have been working with so at least it will be a little familiar.
Yesterday (Wednesday) was another long exhausting day with good one to ones but the reading groups were still trouble. We changed what we were doing from writing sentences about a challenge you have faced to writing a summary of the book which we thought would be easier. It was still a struggle and I found myself losing patience again. In the first group only one student began writing and the others were still attempting to copy sentences out of the book which is not at all what we asked for. The second group was better with everyone at least getting a few sentences down which was encouraging but we still had issues with Sithandile laughing at other students and I just lost patience with that. He wants to laugh but he hasn’t even gotten very much done either.
The workshop was good. We had four groups again and each group was with one teacher reading a book and answering questions. My first group was good listening and everyone took turns reading. My second group consisted of one student who wanted to be there and then another student Patrick who didn’t really want to be there and at one point walked out and then came back. Then Patrick was the only one who wanted to read. He even wouldn’t let me read the story because he wanted to read. He’s a very bright child but pretty confusing. Going from I don’t want to be in your group to staying after everyone else is gone just to finish reading the book. It was nice though to have someone who really wanted to read. I haven’t seen that very often if at all.
Later…
Another exhausting day but it was encouraging. All the boys did great today and even though I didn’t have the proper copies that I wanted to use, the time still went by quickly. I found a multiplication matching game that the guys really like and most importantly it was picture day! So I got to take pictures with my guys and my reading focus groups. They really enjoyed that. Plus when I went out for recess I was bombarded with students who wanted to get their picture taken. I hope I got some good shots. I even got some at the nursery after school was over.
The reading focus groups went a lot better than they have been going. Everyone got something written though it is still very apparent that they struggle writing sentences. But I’m hoping their writing skills have improved in the short time that we have been working with them. Only Amanda finished all her sentences and tomorrow we don’t have the reading focus groups so we hope that the new teachers will continue our work. We’ll see if that actually happens. We had to explain that this was our last day although I’ll still probably see them since I’ll be working in the 6th grade classes.
It is cold and rainy today which is awful but I just saw a beautiful double rainbow so it’s not all bad. But today has been a pretty bad day for weather.
Me and Onke Grade 6 on Picture Day. I helped Onke with his numeracy.