Day 5

Blog day               13-7-15

Natalie Sproat

Today, we were woken up at 6am by cockrels and the girls at the orphanage drumming and singing. At 7am, we went up to the main building to have breakfast – some people had toast, some had bananas, some had croissants. Following this, at 7:30am, my group went to classroom one to teach form one 7 the first year in the orphanage – we taught them, first, about volcanoes. The school day here is 7:30am to 2pm. The first thing we did was to introduce ourselves in Swahali, “Jina languni Natalie”. Then we drew a volcano on the blackboard wand labelled it. After this, Becky and I demonstrated to the students how to make a paper-mache volcano, then the students made it themselves. Next, the students drew their own versions of the volcano we had previously drawn on the blackboard. After, we taught the students a song we made to the tune of ‘London’s Burning’, the lyrics were:

“Volcanoes erupting,

Lava’s flowing,

Fire, fire,

Ash cloud’s forming,”

Then, the students had to write their own song about volcanoes in groups, which they then performed in front of the class and the best song won a prize. At the end of us teaching about volcanoes, some of the students thanked us for teaching them and that they were grateful, as they had never been taught about volcanoes before

The next subject we taught about was the human body and exercise. Firstly, we drew a human body on the board and asked the students to label all the body parts. Then, we performed ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’, for the students and had the sing it as well, which they seemed to really enjoy. Afterwards, we drew a human heart on the board and the students labelled it – before drawing it themselves. The next thing we did was to play a game called, ‘Pin the heart on the human,’ in which the students were blindfolded and had to stick a heart on a body drawn on the blackboard and the people who got it closest to where it should be won a Kendal Mint Cake. Then, our class was split into two halves – the first half stayed with us while we taught them about the pulse rates, but the second half went to play teambuilding games outside. Whilst learning about pulses, we explained how pulses worked before demonstrating how to take them by having the students taking their resting pulse rate and then taking them outside to exercise and then taking the pulse rate again. Following this, we went to do the teambuilding games with our half of the class. First, we played games with a parachute, then we played the magic stick game and the ping-pong pipe game and then blindfolded follow-the-leader. This competed our day of teaching. We then went to have lunch and relaxed until tea time. In the evening, we played games such as Pictionary and had a quiz.