How many abazungu can you fit in a car?

Harriet and Jane spent a busy day at the disabled village, Ngwino Nawe. After singing songs and playing games in the garden, the 30kg suitcase of resources donated by King's House School parents was opened and shared. Harriet and Jane introduced the pupils and staff to methods of encouraging early pre-writing motor skills and a positive learning environment. Raphael is one of the pupils who has been at Ngwino Nawe for 6 years. His cerebral palsy was originally seen as a barrier to any learning at all when Harriet and Jane first met him in 2010. Since then he has received excellent care from the dedicated staff at Ngwino Nawe, supported by Rwanda Aid. As a result he has developed almost beyond recognition and today he was eager to join in all the activities. He was able to hold and throw a sensory ball and was keen to start early writing skills by making marks with large chalk. It was a delight to see such joy in his face. All the children at Ngwino Nawe use sign language as a means of communication so when Harriet and Jane modelled telling the story of Handa's Surprise, the children were able to not only enjoy the story through their signing teacher, but also took great delight in teaching Harriet and Jane how to sign the names of the animals in the story. It was great fun. 

The afternoon was spent training the teachers in early years education and how to use the resources, not only with the younger pupils but also ideas for the older ones, for example using washing lines and pegs to allow the children to sequence, colour match, order numbers as well as using fine motor skills by pegging the resources on the line themselves and sharing their work with their peers. The teachers were very excited by these new ideas and were very grateful for the support. A whistlestop tour of Kamembe market on Harriet and Jane's journey home prepared them to set up a role-play area in the classroom tomorrow, which will be a vital part of the children's speech and language development.

At Isha, Stephan and Ben taught P.E. The children raced in relays and practised football and basketball dribbling on the new playground, kindly funded by a Devonshire House parent. They particularly enjoyed Tunnel Ball, as well as Over and Under races. Cyriac, the headteacher, helped too and the children loved seeing him take part.

On the request of a Rwandan teacher, Dave taught "If you're happy and you know it" to P3 with Beth, as well as the more demanding task of the concept of active and passive to a group of eleven year olds who struggle with a basic English sentence.

Francine and Sarah had a productive day working on their classroom wall paintings.

The P1 children at Isha emulated what the Devonshire House children had done by making sock rabbits with Andrea and Laurie. They will enjoy playing with them at break times. While making the rabbits the children learnt the names of the parts of the body. Afterwards they played ball games with the nursery, P1 and P2 and taught them the Hokey Cokey.

Stephanie did some crafting with the nursery, P1 and P2, doing painted hand prints and decorating them with sequins and foam shapes. The children loved using the paint and glue, almost as much as the Rwandan teachers!

Maddie had a challenge with P6 this morning. Back at LEH she is used to teaching Indirect Statement in Latin to a class of 17 very able year 10 girls, but today she was tasked with teaching Direct and Indirect Speech to a class of 55 year 6 pupils, who have very limited understanding of English! They particularly enjoyed the game of Simon says.

This evening everybody is sewing cushions for the nursery at Ngwino Nawe. We have also been practising the cups song and we have played an after dinner game of "how many abazungo [Swahili for 'white men'] can you fit in the car?"

A Busy Second Day in Kamembe

Today was a very busy day for the whole team who are out in Kamembe at the moment, with lots of different activities going on.

Day two at Isha School kicked off with Francine teaching decimals, Sarah teaching the future tense to years five and six and Dave and Maddie contaminating water, littering the classroom and setting fire to paper to teach pollution to the year six classes. Then all together taught the banana counting song to the year ones. In the afternoon Sarah and Francine clambered on top of classroom furniture (throwing health and safety to the wind) in pursuit of embarking on their mission to create learning walls in one of the year six classrooms.

Stephan and Sam (the Rwanda Aid farm training manager) went out today to visit some of the farms and see how the farmers are getting on. It was a very exciting trip (partly because they travelled over 100km on motos) and it was great to see what wonderful work Sam does training these farmers to move forward and become self efficient.

Harriet, Jane and Ben went to Ngwino Nawe, the disabled children's village. They spent time in the Early Years classroom helping teachers to develop the space to enhance learning. The children enjoyed building with duplo, exploring sequencing with numbers and colours, and beading. In the afternoon they worked with the teachers to share ideas for developing handwriting skills and introduced equipment such as pattern boards, that local carpenters could reproduce, button snakes and finger exercises. The day was filled with fun, laughter and song by some wonderful children and their incredibly enthusiastic teachers.

This morning Stephanie, Andrea, Laurie and Bethany were taken to Nkombo Nursery by a handcrafted wooden dugout boat. After being greeted by a group of gorgeous children very excited to see us all, Andrea got crafty with some collage butterflies which the children loved, whilst the others sang some songs and taught the children the Hokey Cokey. Afterwards they served them porridge for their lunch.

After returning from Nkombo Beth, Steph, Laurie and Andrea headed back to Baho Neza Mwana where they were helped by Harriet to continue the work on the mural. They added a boat to Lake Kivu and after dark started work on the big jaguar, whilst being watched keenly by the street children.

The evening has once again been spent planning all our lessons for another day at Isha.

First Day at Isha School

Today we spent our first day at Isha School. Francine was eager to see how many of the children were using their drawstring bags that were donated by Normanhurst School in 2014. On our arrival, we saw that they were using them and had safely stored then under their school desks at break time.

Sarah and Stephanie loved teaching an English lesson to the students in P3 and had them singing, laughing and playing a competitive game of 'guess the verb I am miming', while numbers were being learnt in both P1 and P3: P1 through song with Andrea and Beth and P3 through a number bonds game with Francine and Stephan. Dave and Maddie spent time with P6 and comparison of adjectives. They were relieved to investigate colours with P1.

At lunchtime Beth kept some of the children entertained with a game of 'cat, cat, dog' and after lessons were taught an impromptu game of volleyball was played, with some impressive performances from both UK and Rwandan teachers.

While half the team stayed at Isha, our number grew with more arrivals from King's House. This meant that the beginning of the painting project at Baho Neza Mwana got off to a flying start with Beth and Harriet at the helm. The three houses of Lions, Gorillas and Jaguars, will soon have a finished mural to identify them. At least tonight when creating resources the power stayed on.

From Kigali to Kamembe

After the Pipers finally arrived in Kigali at 2am, everybody gathered for our first Rwandan breakfast before setting out on the 6 hour bus journey down to Kamembe in south west Rwanda, where we will be based for the next 2 weeks.

As we set off we were reminded of just how beautiful this country is and why it is called the Land of 1000 Hills. Sometimes when driving up some of these hills we wondered if we would ever make it to our destination.

The journey took us through Nyungwe Forest, the highlight of which was seeing numerous wild L'Hoest monkeys.

(Image courtesy of http://monkeyland.co.za/)

We arrived at Munezero House to be greeted by old friends before stretching our legs in a wander down to Rwanda Aid's street children project, Baho Neza Mwana. The children were all at an event at the stadium but it gave Beth the opportunity to size up the walls for her murals.

The evening has been spent partly in darkness, due to a couple of power cuts, planning lessons for our first day of teaching at Isha School.

Arrival in Kigali

Five of the six in the early arrival party have now arrived safely in Kigali - if you have an Irish passport remember that you need a visa before you travel (we didn't know this at 4.30am this morning)! Settled into the guest house, we are now enjoying Italian pizzas down the road with a beautiful (if a bit dark) view of Kigali. Hopefully three more of the party will fly in at midnight tonight (hopefully, given that their first flight arrived 9 minutes after their second flight was supposed to leave!) Tomorrow we make the long journey down to Kamembe in south west Rwanda...

Andrea with her "Andrea" pizza

Micro-teaching at Teacher Training and Goodbye to Rwanda

Our last morning of the teacher training course gave the teachers an opportunity to put into practice some of their newly learnt methodology in a micro-teaching session.  It was clear that Jo's Mind Mapping session had been a hit with the teachers as almost all of the groups included an element of the brainstorming technique.  Group work activities also played a large part in the mini lessons, with the teachers playing the role of pupils with great enthusiasm!  

Stephan and Natasha act as teaching assistants!

Lots of class participation

A mini maths lesson saw the students grouping bottle tops (a resource which is in plentiful supply)

David used a formative assessment technique he picked up from Bridget to establish how well his students had understood the lesson

After the lessons came the speeches given by Deborah, one of the mentors, on behalf of the teachers; Stephan, on behalf of the UK teachers; Peter, the Rwanda Aid Manager; Jean-Pierre, the DO for Rusizi District; and Alex, the Rwanda Aid Education Manager.  There was thanks all round for everybody who had made the week's course such a success before the teachers were presented with certificates of attendance and a goodie bag.

Handshaking and congratulations for the teachers

Ernest, one of the Isha teachers, receives his certificate

Stephan presents a teacher with a drawstring bag full of resources such as scissors, a bean bag, highlighters and stickers

We all had a Fanta with the teachers after the presentations

Saying goodbye to Alex, the Rwanda Aid Education Manager

We had to hot-foot it to Kamembe airport so as not to miss our flight back to Kigali where the team is currently waiting for their 1am flight to Istanbul. We hope that during the course of our short stay we have been able to help and leave a lasting impression on the wonderful people we have met - whether it be by painting a wall to brighten up a school, teach classes in a primary school, hang out with the street children, play with the children at a nursery or pass on our knowledge and ideas about teaching.  We know that we will never forget the truly incredible children, teachers and Rwanda Aid team who have taught us as much as we hope we have taught them.  We would like to thank again the parents of Devonshire House and Normanhurst Schools who have donated so generously to the projects we have been able to see and get involved with during our visit.