First Week of School

Picture this...
I'm walking to school, naturally with a group of about 20 curious nursery school students (4-5 years old), excited to start the day. The children hear a rooster; they all stop, stand on their toes, and crane their necks looking for the animal (kind of like when a colony of meerkats hear a noise). Then one starts saying "murumva inkoko?!?" (Did you hear the chicken?), and they all start giggling happily and imitating the sound of a rooster while skipping the rest of the way to school.

Every day, I wake up at 5am and go for a run to see the sunrise while my bath water heats up on the charcoal stove. After bathing and eating my breakfast, I start my daily walk to school with the 1500 or so primary school students who attend classes in the morning session. For the first few days, time was spent cleaning the classrooms, making the timetables, and taking care of last minute student registrations. On Wednesday, I co-taught a short lesson on introductions in a P4 class. On Friday, I co-taught with the same teacher in 3 sections of P6 (6 periods), then in the afternoon I solo taught another 6 periods of P6. We worked on phonics, the alphabet, and even played a few games. Each class has about 40-50 students now, but I was reassured that the class sizes will grow in the coming weeks as the harvest season comes to an end. Despite the large class sizes, the students were great! I'm super excited for my experience working with the primary school, and I'm anxious to start working on clubs with the teachers in the secondary school! I know this is a short post, but I'll write another in the next two weeks with more details.