After One Month

It's been a while since our last post. We have been very busy. Jenny left this past Monday to head back to the United States so the remaining three of us are much busier assisting in all of the upper school English classes. Before Jenny's departure, we were able to explore Uganda a bit. We spent a weekend in Masindi and Murchison Falls National Park. We were lucky enough to get to go on a game drive, a boat ride to the the base of Murchison Falls, and on a hike to the top of the falls. We also spent a weekend in Jinja, visiting the Source of the Nile.

We finished rotating through all of the classrooms at the upper school and have begun going through the rotation again. We are hoping to begin tutoring students in reading during break and lunch sometime this week. We are all enjoying spending time with the kids in the classrooms and out. We have taught some of the students how to make bracelets out of string which they seem to be enjoying. There's been great demand for string since we introduced this activity. We look forward to our final few weeks here and are excited to continue working with the kids.

All Things Considered: Uganda

We had a lot of fun this week. We spent Monday through Thursday at the upper school and Friday at the lower school. We continued our rotation of English lessons in the classrooms. This week P7 continued their burial vocabulary unit, P6 worked on story-telling and legends, adjectives, and vocabulary, P5 worked on direct speech and indirect speech, P4 continued with their farming and harvesting unit, as well as word tenses within sentences and finally P3 worked on ‘some’ and ‘any’ and their animal sounds unit.
On Wednesday we had recreation time after school, where we joined the children in playing netball and jump-rope games. On Friday we visited the lower primary school where we taught them songs we could recall from our childhood, such as ‘Monkeys jumping on the bed’ and a refresher of ‘Hokey Pokey’. They also taught us their own songs. A few of us were able to help out with English lessons in the lower school classrooms.
On Saturday we traveled to the Entebbe Botanical Gardens/Beach with the family, teachers, and some students, to celebrate Shanel’s birthday. She is now three. Finally, on Sunday we finished our painting project at the upper school, completing the final two classrooms. Whew what a week!

Our First Week

It has been a wonderful week. The entire family greeted us at the airport, and have been very welcoming. We were shown around Kampala on Sunday, which we really enjoyed. We met the students who live at the school over the weekend, and met the rest of the P3-P7 students on Monday morning. The children sang songs and we handed out pencils to them. Tuesday was Heroes Day, so the students had a day off of classes. We decided to take on the project of painting the P3-P7 classrooms, and began with P7 on that day. On Wednesday, we observed and assisted the English teachers in the classrooms and joined the students for Field Day. We walked to the nearby field and played games for a few hours in the morning. We visited the Lower School on Thursday, where we handed out pencils and read stories to each of the classes. On Friday, we rejoined the P3-P7 English classes and then spent some time around Makindye. Yesterday we went to the Uganda v. Tunisia rugby match, which was a very fun outing. This weekend we are painting the P5 and P6 classrooms. So far we are enjoying our time here very much!

Thanks, Joanita, for setting up this blog. I look forward to postings from people at Peace School.