July 13th

Thank God it rained last night! The weather today was much fresher - still very warm but nowhere near as bad as it was. Lets hope for more tonight.

I started the hour long sessions today and already I think it has been a good change to make. All of the children had plenty of chances to practice what we learnt during the lesson, which is so important given that the chances of them consolidating their work at home is almost zero. It was however quite tricky to keep the concentration levels high for the whole hour, so what I may do from now on is have a 5 minute break in the middle where they do something much more active, stand up, sit down, jump around etc so that their minds are really focussed for the second half of the lesson - we shall see. Generally though the concentration of the majority of the kids is great, but there are the odd few who begin to stray, so it is not exactly a major problem.

The session itself today was based on one being the shopkeeper of a fruit and veg shop, and the other being a customer. The customer had to come in, they said hello how are you? etc then the shopkeeper asked what the customer would like, to which they would respond, and then the shopkeeper had to work out using a price list how much it would cost - they exchanged the money and the customer left the room. As always, each conversation was followed by the whole class clapping to praise those that were involved. One frustrating thing that was quite prominent in today's sessions was that when asked how they are, they all respond with "I'm fine." What I tried to do today was explain that they can say "I'm well" or "I'm good" or "not great" etc. However, one of the lads just said to me, "but in school we need to copy" - this just summed up the education system here for me!

Matt, I took your idea and paired the stronger students with the weaker ones and it really did help. The stronger students helped to correct their partners and I am sure it helped all the children. By the end of the session the stronger students were correcting the others with near perfect English so I saw it as a success!

There are a couple of young women that have come over from the US to visit family, and one of them (Nina) volunteered here for 10 months last year, and they popped into the centre for a few hours in the afternoon. Sheeba came and sat in on one of lessons and took some pictures to put on the Women Centre blog, which was nice, and she was very kind to say that she enjoyed my lesson.

All in all, it was a very good day and slowly I feel I am making some good progress with these children.