It’s a true story. I’m at the internet cafe in Bolga (the fact that, in America, people can go on the internet in their own homes! on their own computers!, seems somewhat unreal now) and the girl who works here just turned on the air conditioner – a gecko scampered out. I laughed. I love air conditioners when they do that.
So, a bunch of people, me included, are in Bolga for the weekend for Halloween. Andy and I are going with four other people as Clue ™ characters. I’m Mrs. Peacock. He’s Miss Scarlet (in dude form)(he says)(emphatically). It’ll be a fun time after two weeks of really good teaching. Here are the lessons we did this week:
P4 – Two weeks ago we did an easy lesson on “Things I Like.” They thought of things they like, we made a list of the board (kenkey, trees, houses, pineapple, etc.) and then they just drew pictures of four of them with “I like ____” written above the pictures. It was more of a vocabulary/spelling lesson than anything. This week we did the same thing, except on “Things I Don’t Like”. For whatever reason, they didn’t catch on as quickly to the idea of not liking something, so it kind of morphed into “what are you scared of? what is not delicious?” It worked out though; they came up with some creative things. This is the first term I’m teaching these kids and I really like them – they are enthusiastic and stay on task. A dream.
P5 – Last week we made paper airplanes and went outside to play with them and see whose could go farthest. They were totally into it. This week we made origami flowers, which was harder. It’s impossible to teach origami just by standing in front of a class – it’s just too small to demo – but Andy helped me. We each taught small groups of students. It went well, although next time I’ll do it with older kids. We used origami paper that a Dutch volunteer gave me. It was some pretty legit origami.
P6 – I’m repeating the sewing project with this years P6 class. They are doing awesome with basic running stitch and almost all have finished stitching their names onto the sections of fabric I gave them. Next week we will learn another way of stitching and add buttons. It’s a great project – they get to keep what they make and use it. The P6s last year brought theirs back this year and use them as hankies. A lot of them worked on them further, too, which is cool!
PreJSS – This is my ‘thinking about art’ class. We made up stories about art prints (thnx gma!) and presented our ideas to the class. Last week we learned the difference between representational and abstract art. I put five representational prints and five abstract prints up in front of the class, clipped to a piece of yarn. I told them that all ten of them (they were mixed up) could be divided into two groups – how could we do that? They told me to move the prints around into two groups and understood what I was going for; they put the representational ones together and the abstract ones together. I was happy! You never know if something is going to be understood. I asked them why they made the groups they way they did and they said that the ones in the representational group they could see things like humans and animals and mountains in and in the other group it was just colours and lines all mixed up. I said Correct! and explained that in representational artworks, you recognize what you are looking at, you understand it. In abstract works, you look at it and you don’t know what it is supposed to be. Rudimentary, yes, but it totally worked! Then they made their own examples of each. Success.
JSS1 – We are doing the collage and mosaic projects that I did with last years JSS1 class. This is the first time I’m teaching these kids too – last year they were PreJSS and I didn’t teach that class. It’s a small class – about fifteen – and they’re really sweet and sharp kids. They’re a pleasure to teach.
JSS2 – Nouns and adjectives. Two weeks ago, we did a lesson that was supposed to be describing artworks using adjectives. It didn’t turn out that way because they have no idea what nouns and adjectives are. Perfect. So that’s what we are doing now. This week I explained how nouns are people, places or things and we thought of examples of each. Then I said how adjectives describe nouns and drew two men on the board – one skinny and one fat. I asked what it was I’d drawn and they said men. I wrote ‘man’ under each picture, and then said, ‘true, they are both men – are they the same?’ and they said no, one is skinny and one is fat. I said “TRUE! Good! ‘Skinny’ and ‘fat’ are adjectives, they describe the men’. This was then repeated with tall and short men and happy and sad faces. I think they understood it pretty well by the end. The assignment was to draw a small house, a big house, a beautiful house and an ugly house, and they all did well. It was interesting, though, that a lot of them drew the traditional mud huts for the ‘ugly house’.
JSS3 – We did skits this week and last week. It’s a big class of all the oldest students and it went pretty well.
Yay school teaching classes!
