In my room

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In my room
It made quite a difference arriving this morning with a room and my own key! The slight worry is the responsibility as they seem to exist on one key for a lot of the rooms and chaos ensues when someone loses it or forgets it. I am feeling a bit neurotic about checking every five minutes that I have it in the right place for tomorrow.
I managed to organize myself a timetable and will have six groups of six - two from each class which fits with the very egalitarian system at the school. At least it is only one grade this time and not a complete change in the middle to another grade with three classes. I can only see five groups a day due to the timetable of two long periods which can be split and one short one after lunch for grades R to 2. They have asked me to do phonics. Xhosa is relatively phonic too so it could be revision but I don’t think they do word building with the sounds. All the groups went quite well except the one before lunch break which was going fine until the “food” arrived. There is a daily feeding programme of hot food of a very basic sort which comes at any time and it arrived then. A lot of the children are poorly nourished. At first my group refused to go- I am not sure if this is flattering or not. I insisted they had to eat and they went rather grumpily but all but one came back with today’s offering which was a mix of beans and meal of some sort which they have on a plate and eat with their fingers. It looked quite nice and they seemed to enjoy it. One child had a container of her own and a spoon. The sixth child returned with some highly coloured and flavoured puffs. I know part of the Life Orientation programme is nutrition and healthy eating so I did try and tell her that she should have the food. It all fell apart as they all ate at different rates after coming back at different times. The boys seemed to get theirs quicker. I am not sure if they were more pushy. I didn’t want them to start work with sticky fingers and a bit got on the table. I red them some stories whilethey ate and then tried to resume but I think we had all lost the plot a bit.
I still have not found any of my sets of level 2 books but did find some resources in the cupboard of the room where I worked before where Helen is currently doing some Grade 3 groups. I do feel I have got started now.
As we waited for our bus to come there was someone in the kitchen making 50 jam and peanut butter sandwiches. On asking who they were for, I was pleased to find that two classes of shildren wre voluntarily attending after school art classes. This will please one of the volunteers who was here last time who worked hard to start art in the schools over several visits.
Unbelievably, it rained again today. It is a bit of a shock to the system for us who expected sun and sea. We did have a damp blowy walk along the front. The other shock to the system is getting up at 6.00. I don’t do it any more!

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Comments

[Rose]

great to hear your news!
Hi Sue, I am sorry I have been so very slow to reply but it is has been great to hear your news! You describe everything so well that - again - I can at least begin to visualise what you are seeing and doing. I hope that (a) your cough has disappeared by now and (b) the rain has stopped and that you have sun again ( I have to be able to imagine you body-surfing!) and (c) that you have located the readers and other materials that you sent or took last time. love, Rose