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This was my second trip to Bethany, having previously visited in 2008 as part of the Revidge Fold URC group. One thing that hasn’t changed is the warmth of the welcome when you arrive at Bethany from both the children and the Tanzanian team. But changes there are.
- The new playground which all the children make good use of and provided an opportunity to recognise and count different shapes – even hexagons!
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- The Kibandas provided shade so that lessons and meetings could be held outside, proving useful when practicing preposition skills.
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- The new dining room complete with a library and resource area
- The Shambas have been extended and now the range of crops grown is greater.
- But perhaps the biggest change is the decision to encourage all the children to speak English all the time. Their English skills have improved greatly and this meant it was possible to teach them without an interpreter. It was also possible to hold conversations with the children outside the classroom. It also opened up the range of topics that could be taught. I was mainly involved in teaching Standard 6 and secondary boys, but had Standards 4, 5 and the secondary girls for occasional lessons. Many of the standard 5 and 6 children I had taught on my previous trip to Bethany and it was good to see how much they have progressed. We concentrated on English together – looking at the past, present and future tenses, preposition words and words that can be used to connect sentences together.
We investigated a ‘robbery at the airport’ learning the necessary vocabulary. The students needed to discuss and debate their whereabouts at the time of the robbery to try and identify who the ‘robber’ was. Following the reunion weekend Standard 6 wrote newspaper articles describing the weekend.
Other highlights included playing parachute games and a mixed standard rounders game, which was rather noisy!
Gill Bates
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