Today was round 2 of teaching and it went well! We woke up had breakfast and headed to school. I taught first today and the kids were sooo unresponsive at first. I said guys why aren’t you talking. They said, “Madaam it is morning.” I was like okay everybody up. I said if I let you dance do you promise to talk? And they all started laughing and said “YES madam!” So I turned on a Kesha song and we all danced together! They LOVED it! I settled them down and we started our lesson. I taught them about organic and inorganic waste. I cut six water big water bottles in half and used those as my beakers. This morning before I left I gathered a leaf, a napkin, a half of a mango, bread, a coin, and plastic. I taught them that anything from a plant or animal is organic and will decompose and anything that is not from a plant or animal is inorganic and will not decompose. Then we went to the garden of the school and after placing each item in our “beakers” we filled them up with soil and watered them. I sat them in the window so they could get sunshine throughout the week and we are going to observe what happens! I had the class make predictions and on what objects they thought would decompose and why. After school we came home and had lunch. I took an hour nap before Swahili. In Swahili class, we learned about verbs and subject prefixes. We had tea after class and he gave us homework to do tonight! L

            We still have some more sessions to get through this week before we head off to our sites for the next year (next Wednesday!!). After tea we did a session on how to teach speaking. This was so cool. She had us pair up, and gave us a picture that were very similar but had some minor differences. We had to speak in a different language to figure them out without showing each other the differences. Abby and I spoke in French and it was very difficult! We only could find two differences. Another group had to speak in Swahili another group in Spanish and another group got to speak in English. There were all together 12 differences, the people speaking in Swahili found 1 difference, the people speaking in Spanish found no differences, and the people speaking in English found only 7. So it was very difficult. This was supposed to show us how are students feel when we are teaching because English is not there first language and it is very hard to put things into words when you are struggling with the language. We also went over some other activities or games you could do with your students that are good practice to get them speaking: debates, skits, presentations, chain sentences, etc. We had dinner after our session and then spent a 2-3 hours lesson planning for the next day. Once I get used to it it shouldn’t take me that long but I want to try and make my lessons as engaging and fun as possible and that really is challenging with Chemistry/Biology. I know if I try to do that every single night I will run myself into the ground. I decided that I am going to teach about acids and bases tomorrow. Ions/polyatomic ions have them work problems on the board, etc. So we will see how it goes! La la salama (good night!).