I only had 4 kids in Class 2 today. It’s strange, when coming to Kenya I was expected tons of kids in one classroom, but I have gotten very lucky. At Damside, I only had about 24 kids in Class 3, and at the Light School the classes are relatively small because they mostly consist of boarders. Rongai is also an area where there are many schools, and near Karen, one of the more affluent areas of Kenya. Since half of my class was missing, I was able to work on reading with them one on one. I have decided to focus most of my attention on that. Math is taught very quickly here, as no real language skills are required to understand numbers. The way the subject is taught here, students are also not so much as “taught” as given problems to work through on their own. I also typically teach science, but when there is no application and kids can barely read the language in which it’s being taught, coupled with difficult concepts in terms, there is almost nothing being absorbed. For example, I have been doing the exact same topic with Class 2 for nearly a week. Topics here are very basic, and so a “unit,” does not cover nearly the same amount of time as a unit in the states. Based on these observations, I have decided to focus almost solely on reading and understanding English. Having my kids read today, I realized that they do not even know the sounds that the letters make, and therefore how to sound words out. As such, my focus for the next two weeks is going to be on letter sounds and combinations, and working through all of the basic reading books that I unearthed in the library.
