Too few Sandwiches (aka Model School)

     So it's been a month,tentatively (it depends on who you ask) since I've gotten here.  My life outside of training is very much on a schedule. I could predict what I will do tomorrow after training because it is very similar to what I did today.  However my life during training has changed and will be the same for this week and next week.
      All the SUPEP people (if you don't remember what that means read my previous blog)  started model school.  The first day was simply observing.  So the day went something like this. I woke up at 6:00 am and was picked up around 6:30 (again tentatively) and brought to school Aurora Primary in Nau Aib.  The kids were lined up according to their grade.  One of the Namibian teacher started off the morning assembly by having them sing songs, both of which were religious. We then sang the Namibian national anthem and the American anthem, followed by If You're Happy and You Know It led by one of the trainees.  Then he went on to read from the bible for around 10 minutes, summarizing each sentence.  The last thing said was the lord's prayer.  The students then walked to their classrooms or what they thought their classrooms were.  Since a bunch of people still had to be registered it was up to us, the trainees to entertain the kids.  Not only this, but take attendance as well.  My classroom had 70 kids in it.  While I slowly took attendance using their registration slips my partners led them in a name game and then a round of seven up.  I would have taken them outside but I was busy with attendance so I didn't really do anything else.  At 9:05 we broke for tea time.  For the kids it meant running around for 20 minutes and for the trainees it meant sipping hot chocolate hoping for some sort of food to be brought out.
      After tea time the trainees simply observed one of the teacher's teach.  The teacher in my classroom was Julia a current volunteer who is a teacher. I really liked watching her because she was closest to the kind of situation I would be in (white female).  I picked up on a lot of the stuff that did for classroom management and I have made it mine.  While this was going on we had to count our kids to see how many we had for lunch.  The only kids that were suppose to be in our classroom were the one on the roster.  However this was not the case since some kids got registered day of.  One of the volunteers kept coming in and yelling at me and my partner for having too many kids but we couldn't do anything about it.  So when we distributed lunch we didn't have enough food and 8 kids weren't able to get a sandwich or a juice.This happened only the first day though.  We have had plenty of food the rest of the days.  Usually there are some extras for the trainees.
    Yesterday (Tuesday) was the first day the trainees got to teach.  We were suppose to co teach and use the Namibian teacher if we wanted to, but I taught by myself.  I taught multiplication to my 7th graders with an emphasis on mental math.  My kids were really well behaved. I was amazed at how attentive and well behaved they were.  I started off by having them solve 2 word problems on the board as I checked homework.  Then I had them work on visualizing what multiplication.  This meant showing that 2 x 5 could mean 2 groups of 5 or 5 groups of 2.  From there we went over how to read the multiplication table and then we went outside and played around the world.  My kids loved this game and they did really well outside.  Since we had 51 kids I split them up into 2 groups and had one with me and one with my partner.
    In the afternoon my partner and I taught 5th graders and my partner taught them the wobble, and the cupid shuffle.  The kids loved getting up and dancing around.
    Today I taught a creative writing class. I started off by having my kids think about what a poem was and we went over their answers.  Then we talked about imagery, what it was, and why it was important for poems.  I read a poem called "I am".  We talked about the imagery that was in my poem.  Then I had them create their own poems.  A few of my kids followed the correct format but a bunch didn't understand it.  For those I focused on making sure they had at least 2 of the proper lines and then anything else written down.  At the end we shared our poems. A bunch of the boys wrote about being a famous soccer player.  One even wrote all about Messi.
   Monday through Wednesday we had 4 trainees in a classroom.  Each one taught one lesson and the class size was around 50.  The purpose of this was to watch each other and pick up some skills.  Tomorrow (Thursday) until next Friday we will have our partner in the classroom but we will be teaching individually.  We have 2 groups of kids.  One group in the morning before tea time, and another after tea time.  My class is grade 8.  I'm planning on doing the same poetry lesson.  Then I have to do 2 more math lessons, 2 drama lessons, and 1 more creative writing lesson.  For math I want one of my lessons to be on order of operation and the activity will be a relay race.  For drama one class will be on comedies, and the other on tragedies.  I don't know what my other math lesson or creative lesson will be yet.