Friday

I woke up tired and having a headache. Not the greatest way to start the day but it got a lot better. My tutoring group showed up at 8—it was my four boys again: Elias, Justice, Ndamiwe and Junior. We made flashcards for the letter A-D and got to draw pictures, which they loved. We practiced getting the sounds of the letters down and they did fairly well on that. I also showed them pictures of my family on my laptop, and the LOVED the computer! So after doing the alphabet part for a while, I popped a CD into the computer and we sang some Jim Gill songs. I love Jim Gill because he does funny songs, but they’re also practical for learning body parts etc. The boys thought it was great, so I’m going to have to make that part of our regular routine. Since they loved the computer so much I decided to find some YouTube videos I could show them. I found two cute little counting and ABC songs, which they loved. They kept calling them “cartoons!” They were sad when I put the computer away and told them it was time to go home. They said, “No, no, no.” That made me feel good! They wanted to stay and learn. J

Erika and I want to make English on Fridays a little different and fun. Today we decided to start by showing the ladies PowerPoint slides with pictures of our family. I went slightly overboard and had about 30 pictures on my slide show. They seemed to really enjoy hearing about my family. They seemed shocked when I kept saying “they’re studying to be a teacher” or “my mom used to be a teacher”. Lots and lots of teachers in my family. After Erika showed her pictures, we passed out the prayer sheet. I had written up and made copies of 4 prayers: The Lord’s Prayer, the common table prayer, Luther’s Morning Prayer, and Luther’s Evening Prayer. Today we read through the Lord’s Prayer several times, and then had them say the chewa version to us. They seemed to enjoy that and it was different than what we usually do to start the day. In my small group today we did a lot of focus on nouns and verbs again. To start, I checked their homework. They came up with a list of as many nouns and verbs as they could think of, so I had each lady come to the whiteboard and write one of their nouns and verbs. The majority of their nouns we names of people but that was ok. I had them then try to create sentences using nouns and verbs from the list. That seemed like the perfect challenging activity, not too difficult but I could tell I was really making them think, and they seemed to understand it. There were a few issues with spelling and grammar, but I explained why it was wrong and we moved on. They take correction really well because they want to learn this stuff, which is nice for me because I’m not afraid to correct them then. After this exercise I passed them out slips of paper with nouns and verbs we have learned this week. They had to sort the 5 pieces of paper into two piles: nouns and verbs. Then they got together with a partner and had to use their combined pieces of paper to think of and write 2 sentences. I was so impressed with the sentences they came up with! There were some quite complex ones with 3 nouns and 2 verbs in one sentence. They had to read their sentences and again, identify the nouns and verbs. While they were working on their sentences, I wrote a paragraph in English about a supper routine, with some words we haven’t learned. We read through the paragraph (I’m always impressed with how well they can read; it’s just a matter of comprehension) and identified new nouns and verbs. They had some really good questions about what parts of speech other words are. I tried explaining the best I could, but some of the words I just tell them not to worry about because it would be opening a can of worms. They seemed interested in learning about adjectives so we’ll probably do that next week.

We finished the day with Bananagrams. They just looked through all the tiles and tried to create words; I thought this would be a fun way to end, plus it focuses on spelling. Bertha loved this! She was coming up with all kinds of words! For some of the others it was more difficult, but this is definitely something I’d like to do again. Maybe it’ll be our Friday thing.

When we got back home Anne had freshly baked biscuits waiting for us. Have I mentioned what a saint this lady is yet?? I can’t say it enough. They were the most delicious biscuits ever…slightly sweet and slightly savory with a hint of lemon. She had grated a little bit of zest on the top to just give them this delicious lemony flavor!!

At 11:30am we walked over to the press building to meet with Pastor Chijoka. He is the head of the two Lutheran schools in town where we will be doing the teacher training sessions. He just wanted to meet us and get an idea of the ministry we’re doing here so we can see what role we can play at these other two schools. He is an extremely nice man, like everyone here is. He said he remembered Dad. J So we decided to meet up with him a week from today and go to Matero school to meet with some teachers there so we can discuss how best to serve them.

After this we headed up to Dee and Dave’s. They left again this morning for their 2^nd sight-seeing adventure with their friends. They’re going to South Luangwa for a few days. But Dee called and said we could take their bikes for the weekend, so we’re excited to maybe use those tomorrow.

The afternoon was pretty laid back. We did some more brainstorming for lesson planning next week. I also took a nap, which was glorious because it was raining. Nothing like taking a mid-afternoon nap to the sound of rain. The rain stopped in time for us to take our usual 4:30 walk with Mrs. Birner.

Our supper was a wonderful shepherd’s pie with coleslaw. Erika and I sat outside for a bit in the glorious, cool evening air before heading in to watch Friends and chat online with family a bit.

It’s nice knowing we have a long weekend ahead of us. Who knows what adventures may lie ahead for us…