Back to the Routine

I knew the long weekend would catch up to me today. It was hard getting out of bed this morning. After a shower and breakfast and catching up with The Bachelor finale news (boo Courtney!) we headed over to church for English. Today is the day they don’t have Bible study first so the ladies slowly trickle in. Today we started with some speaking: telling about something you did this weekend. Then we sang Amazing Grace in English and said the Lord’s Prayer. When we got into our smaller group I introduced the new theme for the week: the human body. We started out with labeling a picture of the body, and focused on getting the spelling and location of each part correct. Then we moved on to adjectives. I explained what an adjective is and tried to give lots of practice when using it in a sentence. They seemed to understand for the most part. The hard part was coming up with an English sentence in which to insert adjectives. Surprisingly, they really seem to enjoy this grammar aspect of English. So I think we’ve kind of found a nice pattern: learn some vocabulary that has to do with a theme, just to broaden the amount of English words they know, and then do mini-lessons within that theme on different aspects of grammar. These ladies are smart ladies! They really pick up on things pretty quickly. I just keep imagining if I were learning Chichewa, and my Chichewa teacher only spoke Chichewa, there is no way I’d be able to learn the language as well as they are learning English! The hardest part continues to be the speaking part. They can read English sentences, and memorize spellings, but then using English sentences off the top of their head is very difficult. This is one thing they told me they want to learn to do (speak in English better), so I’ve got to find a way to get them to talk more. Today I tried having them talk with a partner, describing what that person looked like or saying anything they knew about that person, in English. I don’t think anyone did it. They all are pretty hesitant to try. I always let them know that I don’t care how broken their English is or how many mistakes they make and that the best way to learn is just to try, but they’re still scared. Oh well! I will have them talking by the middle of May, that’s my goal!

I let the ladies leave about 10 minutes early today because they worked hard, plus, I ran out of things to do on my lesson plan.

We had a few minutes to regroup at home before our tutoring kids showed up. Today I had Raphel and Samuel. We worked on letter sounds—making flash cards and drawing pictures. I also showed them some alphabet song clips from YouTube. Then we did some jumping jacks and Simon Says just to get them moving since they’d been sitting for a while. Then I did some basic math with them: addition and subtraction of single digit numbers. They seemed to be fairly good at addition, but subtraction was more of a struggle. We drew picture sentences and even acted out a couple of “take away” scenarios. We’ll have to work more on this next time. I’ll also probably do more songs next time, and Raphel still needs quite a bit of help with his letter formation so I’ll have to think of a way to help him more individually with that.

Lunch was a delicious PB&J, an apple, and a banana with an episode of Friends thrown in there too. I love lunch because it also gives us time to think about what we’re doing for preschool and our afternoon tutoring. Chunking our day like that makes the planning part easier.

Preschool was fine today. We stuck to our regular “routine”, or the routine that we came up with at least. I’m pretty sure it’s not what Charity does, but we found a way to make it work for us. We sang most of the same songs we sang last week, including some different ones this time. The kids remembered the songs from last week, so I just know by the end of our time here they’ll have them down! Can’t wait to hear them singing them at the top of their lungs. Goshen giggled his whole way through A Ram Sam Sam today—it was so cute! We did the letter B today, practicing forming it in the air and on our palms before writing it on paper. Most of the little kids just enjoy coloring when we give them the paper, and that’s totally fine with me. There’s no way I’m going to make a 2 year old write a letter “B”. After the letter we did a few stories and some more finger plays before heading outside for free play.

I barely had a break to cool off and unwind from preschool before my girls showed up for tutoring. They were 20 minutes early. Oh well, that meant I could finish early as well. I had Chipo and Mwandida this afternoon. They are such a fun group: giggly, sweet girls. I had my water bottle out there with me and saw them eyeing it up so I got them each a mug of water from the bore hole tap. We were like a little ladies club: drinking our waters and have a fun old time learning the ABCs. We did a lot more challenging things today. I wanted to see what they were capable of. I’m more confident that they can identify letters now (not just if they are in sequential order) but we really have to work on reading words. I really think they have a hard time understanding what I’m saying to them. After doing letters for a while, I decided to teach them the words of some basic parts of the body. We got to draw a body (which was fun for them) and then label the parts. I told them to take their paper home and practice those words we learned for a “quiz” next time. I really don’t think they have any idea what I said. They kept trying to pass their papers back to me. So it’ll be fun to see what happens next time J.

After our final tutoring, our long Tuesday was over. The teaching part anyway. Then came the planning for Wednesday. I’m not sure what I want to do with the ladies in English tomorrow. Today I barely had enough material to fill the time.

We took a late afternoon walk up to the grocery store to get some bread, coffee, crackers and chocolate. When we got back it was supper time. I don’t know if it had to do with our long day and tiredness or what, but we were both starving and Anne’s cooking was even more delicious than usual! After our usual Friends episode or two we did more lesson planning for tomorrow. We also had a couple bug/creature incidents. It’s hot tonight so we’ve left our door open to get some air and a huge praying mantis flew in here. At first I thought it was a bat! Erika went to get a garbage can to put over it just so we wouldn’t have to deal with it when all of a sudden she dropped the basket and screamed. She said something small and white, with a tail ran up her arm. It was so funny!! We’re pretty sure it was a lizard. We fumigated the area (of course all these bugs congregated around Erika’s couch) and got back to planning. J

I’m glad our Tuesday is drawing to a close. It was a productive, hot and gorgeous day and it’s good to be back in the swing of things again!