Class Profile - Samuel Ntsiko Class 6A + Other Updates

Victoria and I are at the Samuel Ntsiko school in the township directly outside Grahamstown and have a class of 36 incredibly bright Grade 6 (6th grade) students. We have been working in depth with them on Language Arts and are working on reading and writing stories - the art of story telling. We have introduced the various parts of the story and are getting ready to read the Cinderella story from India, the Black Cow, with our class. In preparation, we have been identifying vocabulary within the tale and are making sure our students have full understanding of the words. We presented the word in English and the translation in Xhosa, the first language of our students. We gave our class a definition for each word and as a group decided on motions appropriate for each word. We also showed students two sentences using the vocabulary word in context and asked them to write their own. We are on our way to reading our story with the class!! For 'Maths', we have been reinforcing good habits and I have been working on forming a strong connection between addition and subtraction. I have also used their vocabulary words in word problems and have reinforced a connection between Maths & English, which to me speaks to the importance of inter-disciplinary studies in education.

Today in class, our students had to bring in a word in Xhosa and its English translation and they really enjoy teaching Victoria and me their language (and they are not shy to laugh when we get it horribly wrong)! Another project we have been working on is a paper chain. Whenever we have downtime in class, we give students a rectangular piece of construction paper and ask them to write their name on one side and to answer a question (using English words and drawings) on the other. Some questions we have asked are favorite sport, favorite color, birthday, favorite school subject, and favorite animal. They really enjoy drawing them and were so impressed the first time we showed them the chain!! We add to it whenever we can and our goal is to get the chain all around the room by the end of our time here.

In other news, this experience is absolutely wonderful. I have been meeting reallly amazing people and hearing great stories. We also got a chance to get very close with elephants which was majestic and humbling at the same time. Today, we had a lecture with Russel Kaschula, the Head of Languages and Professor of African Languages at Rhodes University. He helped up with our Xhosa pronunciation and we talked a bit about the difficulties of a multilingual society--South Africa has 11 official languages recognized in their constitution yet English and Afrikaans are clearly the languages of power. Russel was insightful and I think we all would have benefitted from spending more time in the classroom with him.

I am enjoying South Africa and this experience so much and absolutely love going to the classroom everyday! I'll update this post with photos of our class tomorrow (and one of the elephants) as the internet at the cafe is very slow right now.

Cheers for now!
Julie