Tuesday 14th July
Arrived in school as usual around 8.20am to be met by James the HT. We then decided to use the first hour to see some of the teacher’s planning and get a feel for some of the classes we hadn’t seen. It was great to see P1 outside having circle games to begin the day. The teacher and children were clearly loving their time together.
P3 were busy chanting tables and counting numbers in the thousands. P7 were doing some environmental studies about tree planting and looking after trees – we later discovered this teacher had left for a four day course at the Kolping Hotel in Masindi run by the Jane Goodall Institute and facilitated by some Canadian teachers. They are running a course on using the Budongo Forest and the chimps as a learning resource using co-operative learning strategies. It sounds such a great course I wouldn’t have minded joining them!
Kate and I saw a chance to work in P3 demonstrating a simple strategy using their slates and chalk. It was mayhem! Trying to organise over a hundred children who have no system of organisation or experience of anything other than chalk and talk was utter chaos. However, after a while everyone settled and got into the hang of the ‘show me’ idea. They were working on writing numbers in the thousands and were certainly very excited about it. Kate was in her element!
After break Kate and I were kept busy with James and Nelson adding the targets and action points to the Development Plan. It took us two hours to flesh out one point with appropriate targets but hopefully he is clear about what he needs to monitor and where he can access training to support the improvements. In the afternoon we had a staff meeting for an hour and a half which seemed to go quite well. Essentially the staff need to be informed about the process and understand what the School Development Officer will be looking for in terms of improvements. We shared lots of strategies and ideas and got them to generate open, higher order questions almost without them realising!
Kate and I left school exhausted but happy that we had managed to do quite a lot today and had made some progress in terms of sharing ideas. They seemed to be very positive about the things we were suggesting, now it’s over to them to make it happen…
Unfortunately there has been no power all day around Masindi and they can’t get in touch with the service provider to get me access to the wireless network at the hotel so this blog will just have to be posted when I get a chance. I’m amazed that it has worked so well so far to be honest!
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