School Based Training!

I had my first week of teaching this past week! I taught P2, which is about the equivalent of first grade back in the US. It was a whirlwind of coordination (between me and my fellow Peace Corps Trainee (PCT) teachers), crafting, and stories—so many stories! We used Bah Bah Black Sheep for our fluency passage all week, we read a different book each day out loud to the class, and we each took a small group of students for 45 minutes at the end of the morning and read another fluency passage (I chose "Pancake" by Shel Silverstein) and another book (a few pages each day, so we could really put the focus on comprehension). I never thought picture books would be such a prominent part of my adult life, haha!

There were five of us PCTs teaching this P2 class together, but never more than two of us were teaching at one time. The rest of us would be observing PCTs teaching in other classrooms. We taught a few lessons in pairs, we each co-taught a lesson with the Ugandan classroom teacher, and some lessons we taught as individuals.

One of our lessons was describing uniforms in English, and these were kind of like paper dolls. We had the pupils tell us the name of each part of clothing, and then they got to come up and tape it to the stick figure! :)

The P2 classroom we taught in had about 60 students in it. Some days a few less, some days a few more. This number of students in a classroom on the average to low side for a Ugandan classroom. There can be 70 or 80 students in a primary level classroom, or 170 in a class at a Teacher's College. So, please, take a moment to reflect on how amazing these Ugandan teachers are, to be taking on the responsibility of the education of 60, 70, or 80+ learners every day. 

The classroom teacher for P2 is Teacher Joyce and she is lovely. She's everything I aspire to be as a teacher. She's enthusiastic and encouraging, and she holds her students to the standard of behavior she has set for them. She expects them to be attentive, respectful, and participate—and from what I've observed, they hang on her every word. 

The way we taught this week, to get the best variety of practice possible, we coordinated our lessons. We started with phonics, and then one of us would teach a vocab lesson with words from the book that another of us would read later that day, for the read-aloud lesson. Before the read-aloud, one of us would teach a reading strategy (predicting, sequencing, making connections, etc.) which is what would then become the focal point for the read-aloud lesson.

Teaching about "making connections" before Ren's read-aloud lesson

I think I can speak for my cohort in saying that we all put out our hearts into planning these lessons. We got on the bus to the primary school at 7:30am, taught all morning, had mandatory Peace Corps classes to attend ourselves in the afternoons (topics like medical or culture), then an hour or so of free time before it gets dark around 6:45pm. After dinner, many of us remained in the main hall working on lesson plan materials until 11:30pm. 

So when I wasn't teaching, I was observing my fellow PCTs and they were STELLAR. I am blown away by how engaging each of them is as a teacher, and how creatively everyone has incorporated literacy into their content lessons. I observed 17 lessons this week and taught 5, and I feel so much more comfortable in the classroom now. I definitely need more practice, but I'm so happy to get to do this for the next two years! 

Busy busy busy

Another of Shel Silverstein's poems that I used for fluency