Thursday 1st and Friday 2nd August- end of the first week at school

On Wednesday I had finished going over picture graphs in maths with my class, so on Thursday I did a very brief recap of the picture graphs, before going into tally charts. I began by explaining what tally charts are which I thought would take 10-15 minutes but ended up taking no time at all, as my class picked it up very quickly. So after some brief explaining and examples, I sent my class out for 2 minutes to each collect as many stones as they possibly can. After which they would count out their haul and then write it in their individual table, they would then work out the total of their own tables and compete against the other tables.  In English we continued with the work we had been doing. I decided to try something different in science and do some group work, which is something that I had been told that classes struggle with. I divided my class into 2 groups; one would make a poster on ticks while the other made a poster on cockroaches. They worked generally well, but there was a lot of cheating, with each group seemingly nominating someone to go and copy from the others and or to sabotage their work. It got so competitive that each group also ended up having a ‘bodyguard’ to stop copying and potential sabotage. I ended up having to stand between the groups to make sure they focused on their own work, but all in all it went quite well. At the end of the lesson, several students gave me hand written letters which I will hopefully frame back in England

Friday was very much the same, I continued with tally charts in Maths and in English I finished off the past tense so that next week I would be able to go into the future tense. After English myself and the other volunteers at the school were picked up and taken back to the lodge where we quickly packed before heading on a 3 hour bus ride to lake Binyoni which is a lake resort. On the first night we had a nice dinner and then proceeded to get very drunk and embarrass myself, so I won’t go into that, as well as late night swimming in the lake. Afterwards we eventually went to sleep in our tents.