26 days until the end of term 1, which means we are about a
month away from our IST (In Service Training) and six months in country. It is
so crazy how fast all of these things are approaching. I cannot believe that we
have already been here for about five months. It’s hard to even begin to sum up
how I feel about the term coming to an end. It’s ending the first three months
of actually being a full-fledged volunteer. In these three months I have been
able to accomplish a lot, meet several people, travel as far as a could, got a
tattoo, and picked up a new responsibility of Regional Spelling Bee Coordinator
for Central. It has truly been a rather enjoyable few months. Even with the
amount of anxiety I have dealt with as well, which we can talk about in a later
blog post.
In term
1 I was able to complete my EGRA in record time and begin teaching whole class
phonics for P2 and P4 three days a week and one group of small group reading
intervention for P4 five days a week. I have also been asked to teach phonics
in other classrooms as well and cannot wait to begin doing that next term. It’s
so exciting that students want me to teach their classes phonics. Hopefully
this will lead to me being able to model teach for the teachers so they will be
able to carry on teaching phonics when I am no longer teaching at their school.
Next term I also plan to teach whole class reading instruction to P4 instead of
whole class phonics because this will allow them to get a range of literacy
tools and will allow me to teach more whole class instruction to P2 and P3.
Whole class reading intervention teaches phonics for 15 minutes, fluency for 5
minutes, vocabulary for 10 minutes, and reading comprehension for 15 minutes,
teaching for a total of 45 minutes. I will still teach two small group reading
intervention groups in order to work closer with the pupils who need that extra
attention.
I am so
excited for term 2 because with term 2 comes Spelling Bee competition and me
starting a theatre program at my school which hopefully will turn into me
running some small theatre camps for pupils in my district and possibly
districts around buikwe. Term 2 is going to be quite the term. There is going
to be a lot of things that are happening and I am excited to have more work to
do because I often feel like I don’t have very much to do. Term 2 is going to
be a fun adventure.
Part of
me wants things to slow down and for time to not move so quickly because I
don’t want this journey to end, however I know it’s going to end and each term
brings on new adventures but it will also bring slumps that we have to get
over, but we will get over the slumps. So here’s to them and being brave enough
to get through it all.
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