Progress?

I have just been sitting with an ex colonel from Kyrgyzstan with excellent English who us an at the Ashu for a seminar on refugees. They seem a nice lot, lively but with no time for me except this man who was very interested in my work at the school.  He posed a question I have posed myself about whether I get through to the children and if so how.  At the end of the month I have to say how each class and how each child is doing, I think it is a very nice idea.  This month has its highs and lows (an as a friend noted having started the process to renew my work visa, the highs must be outweighing the lows). It takes me a huge amount of energy to teach the kids.  It is like taking a group of people all of whom want to go off in different directions, but are wearing blinkers so cannot see where they are going and the only way that they will get there is to follow my instructions and my instructions are in a foreign language.

With the little ones they are mostly happy to sing with me, they do a tiny interaction say show me a letter and I help indicate the letter, and they are happy to repeat almost everything I say, so if I cough in a song they cough. But they are not stupid at all in most of this, because they understand things like sit down, and can tell me to sit down, so some of the English phraseology of the class room rather than the specific English taught is being used by them. I found something similar in Senegal where the kids could say be quiet in English but not know other words!!!.  The class has recently been introduced to the letter I.  I got them all to decorate letters and then turned them into alphabet cards for them. I is for Izat and Islam for example, two of the children, which helps them relate to the material a bit we also dip into a book for the course, and the children enjoy the audio clips. The year 1 children also used the same book and most do not know their alphabet and I think that although I will know that all the children have been introduced to the letters most will have only grasped some of them. However, what really impresses me is that they can write so well with very little guidance. The children here like having books, maybe they feel safe with them, they just follow the guidelines and although if they rush ahead they can get things wrong really they just enjoy using the material and in some instances it supports what they are learning.

With year one and two  I try and make them actually do the activities in the books vaguely correctly but how do you do that when the children cannot read and do not understand what they are doing.  I find it very interesting that having tried to introduce year two to categories through games, through board work, through writing up the answers so that they know in principle what the activity involves so that they can transfer that to the next similar activity for the most part they cannot for example they can count to 10 no problem so can the year zero children, but ask them to put numbers in the right category and they do not have a clue. Similarly with making a sentence, even when I write the answers on the board so that the children have a model at least two will get the answers wrong, it is very hard to know how to help them. The only thing that helps me is knowing how bad I am at languages.  One little girl I know she feels in despair at times, so I keep saying you can do it, but whether then sense of what I am saying reaches I do not know, but yesterday she did suddenly realise that she could see and use what I had written on the board. It has taken 3 months, but maybe that will help her.

There are sudden breakthroughs. The children here learn a lot through rote and that helps with the English because they just copy what I say. So one child had to say one sausage during the Hungry Catepillar presentation. He had a picture of the sausage from the book, but I did not realise that that had not necessarily signified to him until the other day he pointed to one of the trilingual pictures that hang in the kitchen where we eat.  It was a picture of a sausage, he asked me what it was called in English so I said sausage and he immediately said One sausage (his line) and the boy next door said, "and one cupcake" his line, suddenly what they had said had more resonance.    So one sausage at a time they are getting there slightly more than not. At least I think they are.