I worked with Ju on his own today. A good decision I think, because it allowed me to see exactly how much he relies on Ha to cue him into what I’m asking of him. He was a little obnoxious, but we were still mostly productive. I’m never confident that he’s trying to remember, trying to understand, what we do in the lesson though. Ha on the other hand has picked up so much since Rachel and I started working with her. She’s got a very clear grasp of the language. Ju is still at the parroting stage. But that’s ok. We’ll get there. So, when I went in to get him out of the classroom, Julie suggested that according to what the rest of the class had been doing I should go over suffixes with him. Yeah. Not that I don’t have faith in his intelligence, but there wasn’t a chance of him being able to process something like that yet. I mean, the word ‘child’ had to be defined, let alone getting to the stage of dealing with ‘childish’. We had a fun time learning about neat vs messy though, and making different choices relative to the word ‘or’.

Zoe had promised her class I’d come by in the afternoon to talk about another animal. I decided to go with seals because they’d been demanding that for a while. It was fun, although I’ve since found that my seal drawings are not considered up to scratch by six year old standards. As if! I thought they were fine. Ok, maybe not as good as my sea otter, or clownfish, but hey, they were clearly seals. Gosh. Give me a break! Anyway, we got into a detailed description about thermoregulation and the adaptations necessary for living in the cold ocean. I’m constantly amazed by how well they handle the concepts I’m throwing at them – I mean, I simplify the way I present them, but still, some of it’s complex stuff. We somehow finished up the session talking about pupil dilation and how your eyes regulate the amount of light that enters. They’re all going to go home and get someone to turn on and off the light while they stand in front of the mirror. Haha.

I haven’t written it up yet, but on Saturday afternoon Jess, Marie and I went down to another local school to talk about teaching there one afternoon a week. Well, at three o’clock today we walked over and spent an hour with the kids there. The school is. Oh I can’t describe it right now. Check back later. So so different. So so barely there in any physical sense, yet at the same time as big as any other primary school. Anyway, at the time we got there it was a break between teaching, which in a way was perfect for us. We spoke with the African lady in charge of the school, who knew a little English, and she said we were welcome to do what we wanted with the kids. For Zoe, this may have meant eat them. Thankfully, the rest of us are not so cannibalistically inclined.* So we called over the eight or nine kids hanging round, and took them out into the little dirt patch of a yard so that we had a bit more room. First we took them through some basic greetings, just to get them talking and such. Then, using a stack of laminated label cards I’d made, we played a cool body parts game. This involved me dragging one little boy to the front, where I told him to stand with his arms out like a scarecrow. Poor kid. He had no idea what was happening. Jess then started handing out the cards with a little bit of masking tape, while Marie instructed the kids to stick them on the correct place. Each child got a sweet for sticking a label in the right place. I have no objection to using bribery to get children on your side. Anyway, it finished up with this boy being absolutely covered in white labels, they all found it hilarious and it set the attitude of the lesson off so well...

Inside joke. Sorry.