We love Anne!

Today started out like any normal day. We had tutoring first today and I had my one group of older kids: Dalitso and Gertrude. We continued reading James and the Giant Peach. They do fairly well with reading the English words but again, it’s the comprehension that’s lacking. So we stop often and summarize and draw pictures of what we read. I also try to find pictures online for them to look at. By the end of 3 chapters I could see they were starting to get a little restless so we moved on to something different. Abby had sent along some letters from her 6^th graders at Hope school in Milwaukee, so we read through a couple of those and started a rough draft of a letter back to them. They seemed to enjoy that and it’s a nice break from reading the novel.

In English class today I was missing one of my students because she was home with a sick child. We kept reviewing our work with adjectives and body parts. I gave them a quiz on the body parts, where I would point to the part and they would write it down. I had a word bank to help them with spelling. They did well on that. Then we briefly touched on the comparative and superlative form of an adjective (although I didn’t use those terms): small, smaller, smallest. I wrote out a bunch of example sentences and they had to identify the nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They’re doing great at this. The one tricky thing is sometimes figuring out what noun the adjective describes, especially if it’s in the middle of a sentence. To help them try to speak more, I showed some pictures of people and they had to describe what they looked like, using adjectives. Some examples: happy, old, dark skin, blue shirt, brown hair. Coming up with adjectives was a challenge! I know it must be difficult to think of an adjective off the top of your head when you don’t have a bank of words in your head to choose from. I wanted to practice this in class because their homework is to pick a family member and describe that person with as many adjectives as they can.

We ended the class with the introduction to what an adverb is. I barely know what an adverb is, so I know this must be difficult for them. They were asking me about it the other day, so that’s why I wanted to touch on it. We won’t go into too much detail but I figured I could give them the basic definition and do a couple example sentences. After learning about adverbs I’m going to take a break from grammar for a while. It’s too much, too fast. So we’ll stick with the 4 we’ve learned so far and just apply them to things we do in the future.

After English we went over to see Christine so we could ask her about getting our visas, but she wasn’t in her office, so we’ll have to go back after afternoon tutoring.

When we got back home we had the most delicious, cheese-filled fritters waiting for us. We cannot say enough how much we love Anne and how well she takes care of us. It so nice to come back midday and have a treat waiting for us. J

Our lunch break was spent preparing for the afternoon and I read a bit of my book “Jane Eyre”. My afternoon tutoring group was Mbimbi (Sovereign) and Shadreck. Once again, Shadreck didn’t come, so Mbimbi and I worked on making more flashcards. She is such a bright, sweet child and it’s so fun tutoring her! Right when we were finishing up, Shadreck came! Since he missed last week too, I wasn’t going to try to catch him up and rush through things, so we just moved on. I brought the kids over to the kitchen area so I could play some CDs on my computer without disturbing Erika’s group. We did some Greg and Steve movement songs, we went on a Bear Hunt and did a Jim Gill song. They loved it! They were giggling so much. I think I’m going to try to keep doing this with my young groups. We spend a good 15 minutes of our time doing fun things, plus they’re learning the English to the songs, so still educational. J

After our final tutoring we went back to see Christine and arranged a time to go get our visas next week Friday. Then we had to do some printing and copying of worksheets for tomorrow’s lesson so we headed over to the press. Unfortunately, the printer was broken so we copied the worksheets by hand and then made copies. It was a scorching hot day today! I was kind of dreading our walk today because I knew I’d be dripping in sweat. Lucky for me, Mrs. Birner came over and said she couldn’t walk today because she got blisters on her feet from playing in the pool on Monday. This was good timing too, because right when she came over here there was a monkey hunt going on. I wanted to go see it. Dave and his friends came over to our gum tree forest with their guns to get some monkeys. I heard several shots go off and finally I heard Anne yell “Rachel! They got one!” So I ran out there and of course there was a crowd already, mostly curious kids, some dads and a couple of the ladies. I got some good photos of the dead monkey. I thought it was quite entertaining. I wish I could have been there to actually see it drop from the tree.

After that excitement we came back and I had to do some more planning. Then it was supper time before church. Anne made delicious sausages, sweet potatoes, pasta and a cabbage salad. Pastor Bangwe from Good Shepherd preached tonight at Bethel. I love Wednesday church—I look forward to it every week, and every week there are more familiar faces. As we walked out of church we were singing Glory Be to Jesus and we did about 4 of the 6 verses before the power went out and everything went dark. It was actually really good timing because we just finished verse 6 and were breathing before the next stanza when it went out. So we just stopped there and exited in the darkness. Today was not the greatest day for the power to go out because I still had some things I wanted to do for planning. Oh well, I’ll do it by the light of the candle. Erika went outside to enjoy the cool evening air and noticed the stars were so brilliant tonight! The best we’ve seen so far since we’ve been here. So we took out the grass mat, brought a couple candles out here and are gazing up at the stars. Soft glow of candles, pitch black sky and night, and the most brilliant stars you’ve seen…makes for a pretty good evening. J