Alarm clock woes

During the night last night I woke up and decided to check what time it was but my phone said 00:00. Bad news. I had no way of knowing what time it was, my alarm wasn’t going to go off at the right time, and I was too lazy to get of bed in the middle of the night to check what the real time was. So I ended up setting the time for what I guessed it was. When you’re dead tired in the middle of night your best guesses are probably going to be wrong. I guessed it was 4:00am, so when my alarm went off 3 hours later (which would have been “7:00”) and it was still dark outside I figured I had guessed wrong. Then I gave up at guessing and just went back to sleep without trying to set an alarm. That was probably a bad idea because then I didn’t sleep too soundly after that; I was afraid I wouldn’t hear Erika get up and then end up over-sleeping. Well it all turned out OK because I did hear Erika and got up just fine at my usual time. But from my calculations I think it was actually only midnight when I first discovered my clock looking strange. Since it’s on military time maybe it really said 00:01 (which would be 12:01am) and I just wasn’t paying attention. Anyway, that was probably a very confusing story but it’s still bugging me!

This morning I had rice krispies with cut up bananas for breakfast. It was such a nice change from oatmeal!

Morning tutoring: Raph and Sam, but I only had Sam today. We did some work with beginning letter sounds for words and some counting work. I had two worksheets for him that had lots of pictures on them to go along with the letter work we were doing. So he also spent some good time coloring the pictures. I love watching how excited the kids get when they can color. Sam stayed very literal with his colors. If the animal was brown or black, he stuck to those colors. Whereas other children will color everything multi-colored just so they can use as many crayons as they can. J One of the pictures Sam colored was an igloo. Of course they don’t really know what an igloo is because there’s no snow here. Instead, Sam colored the igloo brown just like a mud hut would look. There was also a picture of a hand which he colored brown, like his own skin. It was so cool to see how he didn’t even have a second thought about the colors he chose. Of course he would color the hand brown, just like any American kid would color the hand beige or yellow. When Mwandida did the same worksheet in the afternoon, she put more thought into what the skin color would be. She looked over at my hand, and then at her own and she kept insisting she wanted to color the hand yellow, but I told her she should color it brown. J

During English we played a memory game with the church words. Yesterday I had gotten the Chichewa translations for the words from them so today I wrote the English version and Chichewa version of the words and put them on notecards. Then it was your basic memory game. They had to make matches of the English word to the Chichewa word. They seemed to enjoy this game! Then we did a little work with verbs that we can use in connection with the nouns we’ve learned. So I wrote sentences on the white board and had them try to think of which verb to fill in the blank. For example: I              from the hymnal (sing) or I                 to the pastor preach (listen). This was challenging but they did well. Then to finish, we did that dictation game again where I read a paragraph and they had to write down what they heard. The teams were Rhoda, Kaluwa, Parksen vs. Monica, Doris, and Bertha. The 1^st paragraph was household words again and the 2^nd was paragraphs using the new vocabulary. Team Rhoda won both times, meaning they had the least spelling errors or least words omitted. I love doing this activity with the ladies and letting them work in teams. They really are great and helping each other out and I love hearing them debate what I said, or what the correct spelling should be. Collaborative learning!

Since all of Erika’s ladies and my ladies were there today we decided to get some pictures at the end of class. Erika with her ladies, me with mine and then a few of all the ladies together. I’m glad we got some of everybody.

For lunch I had the most delicious avocado sandwich on toast. We got some really good bread yesterday and it’s surprising how much better a sandwich tastes when you have good bread. The other bread we usually got is way too dry, even when it’s toasted.

Preschool went OK today. Nothing really different from the usual, so see a previous blog post about preschool if you want to know more. I feel like I am starting to sound like a broken record with some of these teaching things I always talk about.

This afternoon I also only had one tutee: Mwandida. Chipo was doing some work at home and couldn’t come. I did the same worksheets with M that I did with Sam this morning. I took the mat out under the shade for this afternoon’s session. I love the cool of the shade and being able to feel the breeze. Sometimes it gets too hot for me under the tent. Plus, I like seeing all the action happening on campus as I’m teaching. Mwandida is very smart and I’m impressed with how well she can read English words. She’s got a great handle on the sounding out words thing!

After tutoring, Erika and I took a little stroll around campus, checking out the classroom buildings and watching the kids play football. Then we helped Anne prepare the final bits of our supper—frying the vegetables, sausages and chips. After the conference is over we’re going to have a cooking session with Anne sometime so she can teach us all the tricks of her trade. J

I love Thursday nights almost more than I love weekend nights. Just knowing I have one day left in the week is a nice feeling. Tomorrow I am looking forward to seeing my Mon. Fri. crew of boys for tutoring. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them since they had off for Good Friday and Easter Monday. I’m also happy we get to help Anne out tomorrow, go to choir again, and then have a cookout. It should be a good day!