What a busy day at Mema! In the morning, Form 2 girls applied the before, during, and after reading strategies that they have been learning about, to a short piece of realistic fiction about working in a newsroom. We began class with a quick review of the strategies where students excitedly came up to the board to write the strategies. The students love coming up to write on the chalkboard and their handwriting is always better than mine! Here are the strategies that students have been putting into action…
Students did such a fantastic job participating and speaking up (students here speak so softly that I can hardly hear them), so I promised to teach them a new game…we played a few rounds of hangman. Students had so much fun. I never thought that hangman could be so challenging until we played a few rounds using words in Swahili! The students took it easy on me though, and they didn’t add to the hangman picture whenever I took a turn guessing letters…
Mary calls on one of her classmates to guess a letter.
Her word was shule which is Swhaili for school.
Later that morning, Form 3 girls started work on our class newsletter. They were excited to approach reading comprehension from a different angle. We talked about how in order to understand what we read we need to understand the way we write. We talked about the order of events, using details or examples to support key ideas or arguments, and as well as finding a purpose to write. Students were allowed to select a partner to work with as well as the topic they wanted to write about. The class agreed that the purpose for their writing would be to inform so many selected topics such as school, market day, and athletics to tell others who had never been to Kenya or Mema about this amazing place. At the end of each writing piece, students had to create two reading comprehension questions that a reader could answer based on what they read.
I am going to type each writing piece and add each set of partners picture to it as well as their questions. In the end it will be a very informative newsletter that can also be used to teach reading comprehension to other students instead of relying on the silly textbook all the time (which we are all so sick of).
Here are the girls working together to create an article about the national flag.
Later that afternoon, Form 1 boys practiced some grammar. I was shocked to see nearly 10 more boys had joined my class since last week, bringing our total to nearly 50 freshman boys. The more the merrier!
We have been learning all about nouns! The boys showed off what smarty-pants they are as we reviewed the different types of nouns and they were able to explain what a common noun, a proper noun, an abstract noun, and a concrete noun is. Today we furthered our discussion on nouns as we talked about the articles a, an, and the, that often come before a noun. The boys were able to explain why a and an are indefinite articles and the is a definite article. We also learned that we use the article a before nouns that begin with a consonant letter and we use the article an before nouns that begin with a vowel letter.
To make learning about articles fun, I handed out blank index cards and presented the boys with a challenge. I asked them to work in pairs and select a noun and the correct article (a or an) to go before it. They had to describe their noun using similes and their five senses. They had to create similes for how their noun looked, felt, smelled, sounded, and tasted. Although some nouns could not be smelled or tasted, we quickly learned that we were going to need a few more clues to figure out some of the nouns so we added clues to help. We had a great time trying to guess each others nouns, even though we didn’t even get through half the class.
Two of my Form One boys busy collaborating on what noun they are going to choose.
Here is an example of one, can you guess what noun this is?…
Sight- As big as a house.
Sound- As loud as a trumpet.
Touch- As rough as leather.
Smell- As smelly as a zoo.
Clue one: You can find me in a zoo or on a safari.
Clue two: I have two large tusks.
Clue three: I am a very large grey animal.
I am an elephant!
This activity was not as easy as it looks or sounds but students did a great job working through it and learning about nouns and articles!
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