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Summary of Teaching Delivered – CGM Trip – 27th -11th August 2009
Teaching at Bethany was a rich experience. We found the students attentive and willing to learn. We learned a huge amount. At the end, we felt we had only just begun to understand how we might communicate and teach better. The cultural differences are deep and we would need to understand their context more, have a greater facility with Swahili and spend more time at Bethany in order for us to make a major difference. We hope we made some impact, if only as role models embodying the Christian message, raising aspirations and perhaps to show that learning can be enjoyable.
We've written up these notes in order to set out what we attempted to teach and how it went. We made some false starts and learned by trial and error where necessary. We learned not to take anything for granted. We hope our experience summarised in this form, will capture our learning and assist future groups, as well as give feedback to the UK team on how we operated and the level of education the students were at.
We were hugely impressed and humbled by all that Bethany has achieved and sustained over the years. We left with a far better understanding of the size of that achievement, given the environment that Bethany works in and the life stories of those that Bethany supports.
We were well briefed by the UK team before going and had several months preparation time. This was essential in retrospect as it meant we took relevant teaching materials and were able to be more flexible as necessary on arrival. Any group needs to be sensitive to putting demands on Bethany which has only scarce resources. We feel it is important that those teaching are well briefed before teaching and that they are teaching subjects in which have a good understanding and have revised/learnt well.
We were hugely grateful to be able to use the experience of David and Vicky in helping us to understand what was needed and how students might interpret our lessons/approach.
We were fortunate in having a large team as this gave us the ability to move people around and apply skills where they could be best utilised. However, if we hadn’t undertaken a significant amount of team building e.g. a weekend in the lakes, sponsored walk etc, or had come from a wider circle of people we may have encountered problems within the team, given its size. As it was, the team worked well and we are especially proud of the maturity, leadership and dedication shown by the younger members.
Sports Day first Saturday pm – seven teams – running, balloon relay, and tug-of-war. Seven ‘base’ projects.
Twigas (Nursery), Tembos and Simbas
Leah Berry, Hannah Stringer, Abigail Micklethwaite
Whilst teaching at The Bethany Project in Tanzania, we covered the following subjects:
TWIGAS-
* Playing in the sand and water
* Painting and drawing pictures of themselves
* Creating animals and objects with play dough
* Singing and story telling
* Making certain items to contribute to the Creation display including fish and bird and animals
TEMBOS-
* Alphabet- We struggled at first with this as the children have learned the alphabet all the way through but in a non phonetical way. i.e they did not understand that D,O,G phonetically spells dog. We began to re teach them the alphabet in the simplest form but this took a remarkable amount of time and we only successfully reached 'i'. I am unsure whether or not they will remember this even now as the old way of learning the alphabet is stuck in their minds.
Therefore it is important that the children continue to be taught the alphabet in a phonetic way so that they can begin to spell words using their own initiative and understand how the letters fit and sound out loud.
* Shapes- The children walked around the grounds of Bethany recognising shapes such as circles, triangles, squares and rectangles. They were taught the words and the spellings and were then tested on drawing them.
*Animals- Recognising animals and learning and speaking the names in English and the sounds that the animals make.
* Their own names, ages and how to say and spell out both.
* Creation- Day 1-7 in the story of creation. Craft activities including painting, paper mache, decorating items, drawing, origami and colouring.
* Singing, dancing and story telling.
SIMBAS-
* Alphabet- Most of the Simbas understood the alphabet phonetically and therefore we could begin to teach them small words such as dog, cat, hat, mat, jug, etc. One day we gave them a short spelling test involving 10 words (some of which were 4 letters long). All of the children got at least 5 correct and some of them got 7 or 8 correct.
* Words and sentences- "My name is ______, I am ______ years old". They also learnt their emotions and how to say how they feel. For example- "I am happy" or "I am tired". Other smallwords such as "I", "you", "me", "am", "and", etc.
* Shapes- As with Tembos
* Animals- As with Tembos but also writing and spelling the words.
* Creation- As with Tembos
* Singing, dancing and story telling.
Standard one – week 1
Kathryn Heaton, Ruth Taylor, Lydia Harris and Matthew Underwood.
Sounds - ‘th’ and ‘ng’
Hungary Caterpillar – days of the week
Numbers to 20 – ordering
Played ‘Snakes and Ladders’
Standard two– week 1
Kathryn Heaton, Ruth Taylor, Lydia Harris and Matthew Underwood.
Sounds –‘ng’ and ‘nk’
Read Gruffalo
Parts of body – named and made skeletons
Standard three– week 1
Kathryn Heaton, Ruth Taylor, Lydia Harris and Matthew Underwood.
Sounds – ‘ng’ and ‘nk’
Time – o’clock and half past
Numbers to 20
Started Ngeme on alphabet with Ruth and Matt because he wasn’t sure of all of the letters.
Standard One – Week 2
Helen Cookson, Ruth Taylor, Lydia Harris and Matthew Underwood.
Letters and sounds
Re-cap ‘ng’ and ‘th’ from week one
Started ‘nk’ and ‘ay’ words
Practiced spellings of these words
Re-read ‘The Gruffalo’ and drew posters with the characters on.
Practised numbers 10-20 – played number card matching games and put yourself in the correct order from big to small.
Created a display of ‘Under the Sea’ using glitter, pens and coloured paper.
Standard Two – week 2
Helen Cookson, Ruth Taylor, Lydia Harris and Matthew Underwood.
Letters and sounds
Re-cap ‘ng’ and ‘nk’ from week one
Started ‘ay’ and ‘ee’ word practised spellings.
Re-read ‘The Gruffalo’ drew posters with the characters on.
Practised numbers 10-30
Talked about big and small numbers and ordering numbers 1-20.
Played number card games and ball games where each child has a number.
Created a display of ‘Under the Sea’ using glitter, pens and coloured paper.
Standard three – week 2
Helen Cookson Ruth Taylor, Lydia Harris and Matthew Underwood.
Ngeme - practised the alphabet and writing letters. Counting from 1-20.
Anna and Maria – started ‘ee’ words and wrote sentences using ‘ee’ words. Introduced ‘igh’ words and wrote sentences. Clocks – half past and quarter past.
Played Snakes and Ladders
Standard – four, five and six
Judith Taylor, John Tranter, Helen Cookson (week one) and Kathryn Heaton (week two)
Summary
We struggled with the standard books and eventually stopped using them. They are:
sometimes wrong
use situations alien to Bethany e.g. airports, supermarkets etc.
rely on blackboard teaching with little interaction
above the standard where the children are actually at.
Basics for 5 & 6 can not be assumed:
1. Numbers
2. Time, e.g. the concept of an hour
3. Before, after, longer shorter etc. (possibly other comparatives)
4. Using a ruler – measuring, especially with accuracy
Challenging them to disagree builds confidence as does repetition and revision
Phonics started to give them a way into writing and reading language.
Using translators meant:
- Teachers could use more complicated sentences and so listened less to what students really needed.
- students sat back until the translator spoke.
We found students were worried about making mistakes and/or were anxious to please. We did therefore use the interpreters to emphasise that we wanted people to try and that making mistakes was part of learning.
Using culturally appropriate story books gave high levels of engagement. The books we had been given to take out with us were brilliant in this respect. They like stories and coupled with phonics could be powerful.
Challenge was good as were practical tasks. Keep things pacy and active.
Standard 4 enjoyed making things and singing. We used making things for teaching other things. Singing was an end of lesson fun thing especially when they were sleepy before lunch.
A basic curriculum based on Bethany children’s needs would be useful - but would require investment and time. Food comes first.
When we started a lesson discussing something ‘topical’ e.g. the killing of the snake at lunchtime or using the Swahili names for things, this seemed to go down well and gave a good ‘atmosphere’ and rapport.
We found that even when we got the right answer to things we needed to continually check they understood. Using yes/no questions and answers are likely to give particularly misleading results as they tended to answer in the way they felt we wanted. (therefore use open questions)
29th July Std. 4,5 & 6
Made name badges
Wrote about ‘Who am I’ & ‘What I like’
e.g. name, age favourite colour, favourite game etc.
Std. 4:
Read ‘Get out boys’ – sentence by sentence. Each look through, only covered a few pages, spent time ensuring they understood word such as river and rock. Tried getting pronunciation of L’s and R’s right i.e. river = liver.
Noted range of ability.
Std. 5:
Followed unit 12 for politeness. Reasonably OK…
Std. 6:
Used lesson one from unit 6. Collated a big number of words they didn’t understand. Airport beyond their experience and irrelevant.
30th July
Std. 4 ‘ Get out boys’ – Used vocabulary and drew pictures to illustrate words.
Std. 5: Continued politeness unit 12
Std. 6: Used ‘Runners Magic’ – in small groups (4-5) This worked well as close contact with children. Tested words with Reheema had written in Swahili.
31st July
Std. 4: Thought we would use clocks – awful! Resorted to sunrise and sunset which they could understand. Morning, midday etc. (note: Tanzanians read the clock with a six hour difference!)
Story reading continued.
Std. 5: Used time approach and finished politeness unit.
Std. 6: Used ‘time’ approach and read ‘Runners Magic’.
Second week
Kathryn joined us and did phonics with all groups for one lesson each day – see video!
This was very interactive and generated high levels of engagement. Also Kathryn built their confidence by challenging them “Are you sure?” etc…. (the consummate professional !!!)
Tried to get across the message that we need to know what they know to teach better!
We found that the children could say the names of the letters but did not know the sounds made by the letters very readily. It was necessary to go back to basic phonics to assist them with their spelling as they found it very difficult to segment and blend words together because they were unsure of particular graphemes in isolation, EG: ee, oo, oy, air, ay. Due to time constraint, this was only begun.
For the other session we continued the time theme (see photographs for diagrams)
E.g. Night, sunrise, morning, midday, afternoon, sunset, evening night. Asked they to put related activities on chart!
Before /after was a major problem using this approach as the interpretation was that afternoon came before midday, as the afternoon was closer to the ‘finishing’ line of sunset. So therefore, logically midday was behind afternoon . Never solved that one totally!
We used a simple sundial with all classes. This was brilliant given the weather! (cloudy a lot of the time) We could use words like ‘longer’ , ‘shorter’ etc. We measured the length of the shadow for each hour. Also drew around their shadows. We then went with the older groups as plotting agraph. This showed that the groups did not know how to use a ruler to measure things and some had problems with numbers.
We showed the outlines from each group to show different lengths depending on the time of day (using similar size students)
Even those who knew their numbers had problems with questions such as: “Is 19 bigger than 14?” and “Give me a number smaller than twenty.”
With group 5 we did get so far as to find the length of shadow for an intermediate time so as to demonstrate the real use of graphs. Given the issue with numbers – who knows?
Standard seven – weeks 1 & 2 – Leah Bell, Rachael Adamson & Nicholas Taylor
Five hours teaching a day, one hour games. Three hours final Saturday. Science level ‘vaguely’ GCSE….. Tests were set after each section covering the essential knowledge – with some excellent results others not so good! Each child’s book was marked/corrected and presented to them at the end as a record of the two weeks, hopefully as a reference for the future. Final morning those present covered blackboard in the subjects we had covered form memory – between them they remembered most areas covered (see photograph)
One child really caught the biology ‘ bug’ and would bring me other diagrams to label and explain i.e. nerves, kidneys – need encouragement – could become President of Tanzania!
We only had the secondary children for one day with standard seven (very disappointing) covered sex education but not STD’s – Hamza and Elijah are very bright and would benefit for a period in England!
It would have been useful to have known a projector was available before we went as excellent materials are available for use in this type of teaching.
Children were banned from speaking in Swahili – not that this was totally successful, very little use was made of the translator available (when available) the better English speaking children help the less able.
Games – Cricket, Rounders and party type games
Introductions – themselves, ourselves, our travel, time zones, longitude and latitude, the world!
Anatomy
Body parts – full size drawing and label.
Chest Eye Heart
Abdomen Teeth Foot/feet
Finger Leg Oesophagus
Toe Larynx Brain
Knee Elbow Nostril
Tongue Trachea Stomach
Bladder Skin etc.
Word search body parts
Teeth
Structures, jaws
Plaque bacteria – cocci, rods and spirochetes
Caries – to abscess
Periodontal disease
Prevention
Designed poster
Physiology
Pulse – carotid, radial (practical) Plotted graph of class mates resting rates- accuracy, title, X/Y axis etc
Effects of exercise on pulse – measurement, data collection, plotted graph.
Height of class – plotted graph
Weight of individuals – plotted as bar chart in Kg
Calculation of Body Mass Index - BMI = Kg/(Height in m )squared
(all children with in or just below normal range)
Maths
Rectangles and squares – perimeter and area
Cubes and box shapes – volume
Complex shapes – perimeters, area and volume
Protractors
– use of
right angles
180, 270 and 360
Complex angles – drawing accurately
Comprehension
Jesus in the wilderness
Jonah and the whale
Reading
Listing words to explain eg: argued, possessions, aching, enough, stretch
Sex Education
2 sessions Biblical teaching on relationships – references 2Sam II, Song of Songs, Psalm 51, Matt 5v27, 2 Cor 13.
Linked to Bethany values: No relationships, sex only with in marriage, one wife, being faithful, rules of divorce. Love
What would you expect of a good husband or wife (interesting comments!)
Puberty – male and female secondary sexual characteristics
Sexual organs - diagrams
Periods – physiology
Intercourse – description
The journey of the sperm
Zygote, twins (identical and non-identical)
Pregnancy, placenta, birth canal etc.
Sexually transmitted diseases: Syphilis, Gonorrhea, HIV/AIDS
(mentioned Chlamydia, Herpes, warts)
English
Tenses – past, present, future.
Verbs
Adjectives –food, people, things on site, weather.
Bone
Reasons for – Support, protection, movement, blood production
Structure – diagram, cells involved
Joints – structure. Ligaments, muscles
Skeleton – drawn full size and labelled, balsa wood model made.
Blood
Oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients, infection, wound healing.
Diagram – artery with red cells, white cells, platelets, serum
Circulatory system
Full size
Diagrammatic – heart and major organs, gaseous diffusion in lungs.
Drama
Created two dramas to perform in the Sunday service. Week one was the story of Paul being bitten by the snake on Malta. Children improvised their actions. Whole class involved. Week two only involved those of standard 7 not in the English choir, doing to story of Nehman. They learnt their words overnight and were very keen to have extra rehearsals
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