August 11th - Mlimani Primary School

I went to kswahili class today and then had a little lunch and walked down to Mlimani Primary school, the place where I will be teaching for the next few months. I talked to my teacher, and she and I agreed that I would just observe today, so that way I could see how that class was run. Halfway through the first part of the lesson, however, she indicates and I should stand up andsays , "Sarah will be teaching a song and punctuation now." I thought that she had said 'Sarah will be teaching a song about punctuation"and I started panicking because I couldn't think of any - all that was coming to mind were School House Rock songs, but I didn't really think that would work.....finally it came to me what she had said, and so I taught them 'head shoulders knees and toes' which , even though they are 10-14 year olds, they LOVED it. Then 'Madam Sarah' told the class of 53 boys and girls all about 'full stops' (periods), commas, quotation marks, apostraphes, exclamation marks, and question marks. It went really well, even though I was totally winged it. I'll be teaching there acouple of days a week, basically whenever I have time. On Wednesday,and am teaching them how to write 'friendly' letters, or letter to and from friends. AND I'm teaching another song.....I'm thinking that Wednesday will be 'Are you sleeping Brother John.' I know that in a few languages thanks to Emily and Rachel going to Japan, I even know that one if them is Japanese! Anyway....it was a rather uneventful....Wendy, Kate, Stacey, Chris, and two random Tanzanian kids played World Cup for a while - that was fantastically fun...my ankle will hurt in the morning, but it was definitely worth it.