Tuesday 21 February
Today was interesting. I worked with my English teacher on writing a friendly letter and comprehension. It never ceases to amaze me how hard the English language is. I take for granted a lot of things in English, especially “hearing” that something isn’t right. For example I would never write something like: The girl feel frustrating. Because I know that doesn’t sound right. How in the world do you teach a child hear if something doesn’t sound right? It’s very difficult, but it wasn’t too bad. I made sure to use an example with my group before having them write their own personal letter and they were actually pretty good. It’s amazing to me what some of the learners write. The group I had was great but once I got into the classroom, it was a struggle. Sometimes I would read a sentence and have no idea what they were trying to say. Then when I asked, I was met with blank stares or just a repetition of the sentence I didn’t understand.
After break, I worked with another group on a story. We first read through the story and then I had them identify unfamiliar words and as homework they were supposed to look up the meanings of the words (the teacher’s idea not mine). I thought it might be better to do that first but it didn’t seem to matter with the group I had. We read through the story several times and finally underlined the parts of the story that answered the questions they had to answer. It took about an hour but they seemed to get it which is the main thing and they managed to write beautiful full sentences!
That took me up until the end of my day because after the last group I had lunch and then by the time I was finished with that it was the end of the day. Today workshop was doing volcanoes. It was really cool. They actually had the kids make their own volcanoes and then combined vinegar and baking soda to make them explode. The kids loved it! It was great to see their faces as the lava erupted out of the volcanoes.
After school, a group of us decided to go on a sunset cruise. There is a guy in the local area that does sunset cruises for cheap. It was beautiful. The boat was a decent size with a top deck with a small bench for seating. We even saw seals, apparently there is a large population in our area which I didn’t really know. Words really can’t describe so I’ll let the pictures explain the rest. (Notice my awesome shorts? Those are the new shorts I bought in Cape Town!)
