Teaching Lessons at Isha School

Yesterday (this is the first of two blog posts tonight!) we spent the whole day teaching at Isha School - here's a run-down of the lessons we taught:

A beautifully behaved P1 class awaited Francine and Natasha.  The children used their knowledge of counting to 20 in both English and Kinyarawanda, and bowled them over with enthusiasm and perception. 

 Natasha works with a pupil on the number line

In the afternoon, the class teacher taught the morning's lesson - but found stones to use as resources

Pupils with their exercise books - which tomorrow they will get string bags to keep them in

The English teachers had three lessons to teach at Isha: P4, P5 and P6, in which a range of topics were covered.  We started our day with a P4 class of bright faces who were both fascinated with and uncertain about our presence.  The topic for this lesson, prepositions, lent itself to some interactive pair and group work, something which we are trying to encourage the local teachers to use more of in their lessons.  We took the lesson outdoors, where children demonstrated their understanding of prepositions by standing in front of or next to their partner, for example.  At the end of this lesson we were greeted and sent off with a  song of thanks.  The P5 lesson was on adjectives and Mr Flood used his expressive face to delight the children in demonstrating various adjectives.  They particularly enjoyed his 'scared' and 'angry' expressions.  Whilst at first reluctant to participate, by the end of the lesson most of the children were eager to engage and show us their work.  The topic for the P6 lesson was 'Direct and Indirect Speech' something we both thought would prove a real challenge to teach children for whom English is often a third language.  However, we were quite humbled by their grasp of the topic; by the end of the lesson most were able to change sentences from direct to indirect speech.

The many faces of Mr Flood

Maddie and Bridget had a challenging but exciting morning - teaching Social Studies with a twist.  The twist being teaching P3 in Kinyarwandan.  This was not to be feared when working with a linguist, Maddie had Bridget reciting animal names in no time.  (Be warned that if you see Maddie on her return from Rwanda, she will probably try to teach you too).  The lesson was with initially shy, yet enthusiastic students, who particularly loved a game of matching animal names and categorizing wild and domestic animals through play.  They particularly enjoyed using their arms as elephant (inzophu) trunks and hopping around like rabbits (urukwavu).  We taught a P6 lesson about flags as a form of unity and community where students designed their own flags for Isha School - and how important the Rwandan flag, their classrooms, the pupils and the volleyball net were to them.  Our final lesson was P5 on water and its uses where we employed a range of pair and group work activities.  The students loved contributing, participating and drawing on the Lake Kivu case study picture on the board.

Maddie goes through the Kinyarawandan and English domestic (amatungo) animals

 

Bridget helps the students with flag designing

Stephan teaching a lesson on shapes

When the Isha teachers taught the morning's lessons in the afternoon the ideas they had observed had been further adapted and given their own unique twists.  As always it was done with signature warmth and smiles.
  We all left with a sense of achievement - the children seemed to enjoy our lessons a great deal and the teachers took on board some new activities.

 A pupil shimmied up the volleyball post to put up the net at breaktime

 The afternoon was spent at Munezero House packing string bags with pens and books for the Isha students