As a parent I know that the first day Nathan read was magic, Abil has been reading the English text book since day one, but to hear him just pick up this book and read it straight away, just blew me away.
I was supposed to be teaching the children, when their teacher asked me to cancel the class as they had not finished their drawings. Normally I would not have been impressed with such a request, but I have been waiting for a chance to give each child a book to colour in. We are able to print books under licence, but have had so many printer problems that we have not done many and those we have done are in black and white, but knowing how much the children here love colouring we figured actually that is a nice way to give the children ownership of the books get them to colour them in. With this particular class I have been away that at least 5 of them reading chunks of work so knew I wanted to start with them but was not sure how to introduce it, but when she said the kids needed to finish drawings I figured, good I can come in just chat with them about the colours they are using and their drawings (of spring for the spring festival at the end of term.) then as they finish I will give them their book to colour. After this boy (aged 9) read his book several others were able to read theirs with more help and even those who do not usually read could begin to see the patterns in sentences like the cats are in, the dogs are in. So magic. I then just wondered round the room monitoring them as they finished their colouring in, but as I did so I started humming one of the songs we are learning together, as if from a movie they started jiggling as they coloured, then I do not know we just spontaneously Fame style started singing the song. It was a really lovely moment. It is one of the nice things here that the texts we are following has a lot of music and that I am happy to burst into song and dance and so are they.
I then went into the class next door, where they are not yet so ready to read, but getting there and did a quiz with tricky words such as what letter is this till we made the word and again even those children who struggle were identifying letters and words so very exciting. This group have been typing letters for International Women's Day- the idea was to ask their mum's and grandma's to a special day with us, I think that idea sadly has now been shelved (for the second term running) but I think using the keyboard which is a real challenge if you are still learning your alphabet has helped them and their happy faces when their letter rolled off the printer despite being very pale grey owing to the lack of printer ink. Based on this they will be needing their books to colour printed out pretty soon.
For some time I have been thinking that I want to introduce some of the better after school clases to another song ( We did Can't Buy me Love last term as it is referenced in the reading material.) So I had been thinking of the song Happy, both cos I love it and cos I figured they would too. It turned out that the first colleague to leave had already done some work on it so she bequeathed me the video to use with the students and today I played it to two groups so they went away very happy to know that they are going to learn it.
I will send a copy of the video of the boy reading to my other colleague who has left recently. He was the person who got the licence for the printing, did the first lot and who has set up this whole English programme. Hopefully he will be thrilled to see the fruits of his labour. It is a sad blow that for the moment he has left the Foundation.
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