Shelby spent a month in Ghana last summer helping to build and create a library, so she was an enormous help to me in the library I’m trying to start at my school. She also came to class with me that week and helped me do a couple of projects I’ve been wanting to do with my students but have been afraid to try alone. (Did I tell you that my student-to-teacher ratio is about 50 to 1?)
One of the projects we did yielded some very interesting and entertaining results. Shelby and I took about 100 pages from the magazines I have (thanks Colleen, Mom, and Mandy! And anybody else who sent me magazines that I haven’t gotten yet) and passed them out among the students. I told them to look at several of the pages and write 5 things they saw in the United States that they like and 5 things they don’t like. Naturally, there were a lot of students who liked kitchen appliances, good-looking movie stars and musicians they know, and the few foods they recognized. Dislikes included people with too little clothing, ugly shoes, and foods they didn’t recognize, among others.
One thing that was interesting about this project was how hung up the students got on knowing the names of the people they were writing about! They were constantly asking Shelby and I for the names of every single person they saw, so I paused the project to do an impromptu mini-lesson on reading captions. After that a few of the students got brave enough to write their sentences without our help. One student in particular had a paper full of gems-both in terms of caption reading and general thought processes. Enjoy a few!
I like Trident White because she has a long hair.
I do not like Victoria Beckham because she is hungry.
I do not like BL Golden Wheat because I do not know what is it?
Shelby and I did get to go to Nyungwe National Park, and although exactly nothing went according to schedule and we didn’t get to see any chimpanzees, it was still a beautiful hike and I’m glad she got to see the Rwanda that lies beyond my classroom.
The following week was our IST, or In-Service Training, in Gisenyi. I’m only about 40 kilometers from Gisenyi but somehow this was my first time there. It certainly won’t be the last, though; it’s absolutely gorgeous there! It was so good to see my group again, and a huge relief to hear that I’m not alone in the things I’m struggling with at school and site. We had a number of really great sessions, one of which was by two representatives from the Project Wet Foundation, a great non-profit that specializes in water education. They gave us a handful of excellent materials and activities to bring back to our schools to help encourage healthy water practices and they gave us candy!
Love and miss you all.
A few volunteers swimming at IST in Gisenyi.
