Blog Number 2
January 10, 2008

I cannot believe that tomorrow is Friday already. This week has seemed to absolutely fly by. Overall I think that it has been an extremely successful first week of teaching. There are some definite differences between the pace of teaching, and practices. As for the methods that I have observed, they are pretty much the same as in the United States. On our first day of teaching, we arrived at school and met with the head mistress. She told me that I would be with a fourth grade teacher. Not trying to be rude, I asked her if there was any way that I could be bumped up to the fifth grade since I needed to be doing my middle school placement here and 5th grade is the lowest grade that would work. She ended up being able to work that out, and I am working with a fifth grade male language arts teacher. He told me that language arts is broken into four different categories; Spelling and dictation, grammar, composition and comprehension. He taught the first three of these and the other fifth grade language arts teacher taught the fourth. He decided that we would split these three up. So I am working with the composition and he is doing the grammar and we would team the spelling.
One thing that I am still getting used to is that older students often come into the classroom and call the teacher away. My teacher seems to always have meetings and they take place in the middle of the day. On my first day of teaching when this happened, we finished the work that they were doing, and then I worked with the students to create a Venn diagram between Accra and Wisconsin. This activity worked really well, and Mr. Bright came and asked that I continue until the graph was totally filled in rather then ending in the middle.
The next day (yesterday) I led the group in a game of vocabulary hang man while Mr. Bright was out of the room, as well as provided the students with directions, construction paper and markers to make table tents of their names to help me while I am in front of the class. Towards the end of the day, Mr. Bright asked me if I had anything else that I would like to do with the children, I had a chapter book along that I was going to read with the students, but he changed his mind and said they were going to do something else. However, from this, I learned that I NEED to come prepared to class everyday with at least 3 activities that will fill time.
AND an older student came into the classroom and requested that I come with her, as another teacher wanted me! Total boost in my confidence J Well I followed her to the JSS building (Junior Secondary School) They are preparing for the National Spelling Bee and she needed an English voice to recite the words to challenge the students. SO she gave me a list of words to make sure that I knew how to say. She told me that we were only doing thirty words, so I only learned the first hundred (out of 300) in the book since the rest were “not being used during the actual bee.” Well when I was called to come and work with the students, the teacher gave me the list of 30 that I would have to read, only about 10 of them coming from the list below 100!!! Thanks to my junior year in high school and the teacher’s concentration on vocabulary, I only struggled with the last two! 1) Cardiomegaly and 2) Dermatophyte.
Today, (Thursday) was another good day. I worked with the children, by myself in the classroom from about 10:40-12:20. The students did a great job with both of the activities that we did, however tonight I have quite some checking to do to return to the students tomorrow. For composition the students were working on formatting letters, so I had each of them write to me to tell me something about them and ask me questions. I have some really great letters.
I am looking forward to tomorrow’s classes, as well as this weekend. Jenny and I are heading to Cape Coast. It is about three hours from where we are. It is known for its slave castles and its national park KaKum. KaKum is a rainforest type terrain and we will be going through a canopy walk!! I cannot wait! Auntie Agnes has already secured out housing for while we are there ($35 a night) and our transportation for getting around!

I will write all about this experience on Tuesday! Hope life is well for everyone!

:) Chelsea (: