Halfway Mark

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Halfway mark

This is the end of the second week although we all feel it has taken a while to get going. I had a bit of voice this morning so decided to go in. There is so little time that I don’t want to miss any more. Joe Slovo was last again _-I missed our turn at being first yesterday. We picked up three older children who the driver recognized by uniform. He realized they had a lengthy walk to get to school and we were on our way to do a volunteer drop off there.

I was struck by the way the detritus was flowering on the buffer zones - the dead areas between townships. Polythene bags and food containers and bits of newspaper wrap themselves around the scrubby vegetation. I also noticed that there is evidence of settling and establishing going on. One small house has a healthy vegetable plot with courgettes in flower. Another has started a lawn so must be glad of the rain. I also noticed that the gardeners, local people, at Joe Slovo have planted out the second section and it looks very healthy.
I had about 30% of my voice back this morning but I didn’t want to miss any more school time so I had to explain that I only had a little voice to with all my children today.. Inevitably the groups are not all moving at the same rate and the looseness of the timetable means they don’t all end up getting the same amount of time. One group today ended up missing a session because of “food”. I am starting to know them but still have not got the names straight. I have created a class list which I will send so that you can have a practice at pronouncing them if you are interested. Still no sets of readers found at the right level. I am sure they will turn up before I go. I have some single books which can use but you can do much more with group sets. I spent yesterday making some more flash cards and a kind of bingo with words to play next week.
We had an unwinding beach walk this evening checking the bluebottle situation. I got some further information about them yesterday from the hotel rep who took me to the Pharmacy yesterday where I got some advice and some very expensive cough mixture - process are high here! Back to the bluebottles. The come in on specific winds, easterly, I think. They are right and left hands and the ones on the beach are dead fairly quickly but the two directions of their tail mean half are always swept straight out to see and survive. They are actually quite pretty.
WEEKEND!! We are all a bit demob happy.

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Comments

[hil]

voices
Glad to hear you have your's back, cos' even when you know them well it isn't easy doing things in a class when barely audible. Demob happy ! Good grief, you have only had less than two weeks in a classroom, wot a wuss! enjoy, x

[Jillian]

Hey too bad about the cough and lack of voice - VERY difficult to teach in any school in that condition - speaking from experience! just got caught up on your last 3 entries...we had a big wind/rain storm Wed into Thurs last wk...R got a late Wed night flight and got to Bath at 2 am as all the flights on Thurs had already been cancelled and then the Fri flights got cancelled as well....it was fortunate - he would not have been up til Sat... the wind was terrific - thought I might be like Dorothy and Toto (Jillian and Bandit and Maggie) so was GLAD he was here - and , we of course , lost power about 24 hrs in Bath and more like 40 down at the coast...which necessitates getting generators running in both locations as both basements will flood w/heavy rain (we had about 6"inches.)...and no internet... Thought at first - reading the blogs backwards that the " bluebottles" we a kind of fly - like the SmPt "green heads" but sounds like they are a kind of jelly fish? it is a shame - it seems as if you have not been able to do much swimming? The dusty environment would drive me a little nuts... hopefully you are a bit better and had some wkend time to rest and recover... XO Jillian