EdCamp Again!

Teachers from Nahumba Primary School listening to a presenter during EdCamp

Yesterday I did another EdCamp.  I think that's number 3 or 4 now. This one had a few bumps but overall went well.

I arrived at the school where I had rented out the hall only to realize that something was up.  The benches were arranged in rows and someone was dusting them off.  There was a nice table with a white cloth set up in the front with chairs behind it.  They'd never done anything in the way of cleaning for any of the other times I'd rented the hall.  A text message came back to me - one I had received at 5am that morning from a head teacher saying that teachers were called to the same school I was hosting EdCamp at for election training.  Hmmm.

The cleaning lady called the head teacher and he told me to wait for the accountant.  EdCamp was set to start at 9:00 with tea, coffee, rolls, sign-in, and getting ideas for our sessions.  It was approximately 8:45 by the time the accountant came in.  My stress level was much lower than if this had been the same thing a year ago!  I liked to come just after 8:00 so I could get the big electric kettle (I don't know what else to call it) heating up!

After talking to the accountant, who suggested we just use classrooms and not the hall (luckily I was expecting a smaller group this time because of the elections training), and me asking for a refund, and him suggesting they just use the money for the next EdCamp rental.  We worked things out and off I went with Memory (who works cleaning our house and does piece work - small jobs like cleaning classrooms for EdCamp, washing dishes when teachers are done tea, etc. for a bit of extra money).  She started madly sweeping a classroom (they are FILTHY after just sitting all term - usually the teachers get the students to clean them on opening day - I should have taken a photo, tons of flying ant wings all over the floor - but I had other things on my mind!)  I started unloading the car and the first teachers started to arrive.  I attempted to plug in the kettle in the first classroom, that was now halfway clean.  The outlet wasn't working.  The second classroom just had wires sticking out of the wall.  Finally the last classroom worked!  So we moved over and Memory left the other one and started sweeping out the room with the working outlet.  I started up the kettle.  Another teacher volunteered to help - so I set her the task of making up a poster saying EdCamp was in Room 7 (I didn't want the teachers to accidentally end up in the hall doing elections training!)  

Believe it or not we started our first session at the originally scheduled time of 10am!  We only had about 7 teachers at this point (Most of the teachers were at the elections training as Zambia is having elections on January 20th.  The schools are the voting sites as there are schools all over the country even in rural areas.  They pay some of the teachers and train them for how to do the polling sites.  Pray for peace for this month leading up to the elections and peace during and after as well!  Zambia is a peaceful country but these things always have potential to go badly).

We started the first session "Beyond ABC Phonics."  A couple teachers shared how they teach past phonics - syllables, words, sentences, etc.  When the discussion slowed I shared some English phonics sayings that help with some of the irregular rules.  I had brought three Letterland books I picked up in South Africa.  The first "ABC" is one I used regularly in my Kindergarten class in Canada.  The other two I'd never seen before, "Beyond ABC" and "Far Beyond ABC" and I thought they were great!  They covered blends and digraphs (sh, wh, ch, st, etc), plus double vowels, r controlled vowels and a few other things.  I always tell Kate and my Grade 1 kids to remember "When two vowels go walking (ex: ai in rain) the first one does the talking and says its own name (long a sound)."  We also talk about "magic e" too. The teachers seemed to enjoy the session.  I left them looking at the books and discussing phonics and went out to order lunch (I've learned to order after I get numbers!) We had 14 people at the final count (not too off from the 25 I had been told by head teachers).  

Kajungu Mturi, MCC peace worker
looking "smart" as it was his
 9th anniversary!

I was back in time for session 2.  I had invited Kajungu Mturi, the MCC peace worker who also lives in Choma, to present on Corporal Punishment and Positive Discipline.  It's really great as he grew up in Tanzania and has first hand experience, so teachers listen to him more than they would me about this subject.  There was a really great moment when teachers thought about a teacher they respected and shared why. None of them respected teachers who just beat them.  They respected the ones who listened and cared and helped them.  A teacher respected one of her teachers who was on time and not absent (believe it or not this is a problem among many teachers: showing up late for class or not coming at all).  We ended with some good discussions of alternatives, though we were running short on time at this point (only about 10 minute).  

A couple teachers listening to the corporal
punishment session

The teachers enjoyed chicken and chips (fries) for lunch (only 15 minutes late mostly due to driving time to pick it up - I promised to tip well if it was on time as last time I waited an hour for it)!  We discussed what we should do for session 3. The ideas left (they were few) were handwriting, the 5 core principals of literacy (I have no idea what those are sorry!), the new syllabus, and I added Classroom Management as a continuing discussion from number 2.  Handwriting won.  (We ended up only using one room - there were only about 2 people who didn't want certain topics but they weren't willing to go into another room to discuss other things.  Partly because one session it was a male and a female and that would have not been acceptable).  A grade 2 teacher demonstrated one of her handwriting (printing) lessons.  After a Grade 1 teachers filled in more for how to start from the beginning - finger exercises, drawing in the air or in sand, writing on the board and paper.  Practicing  writing vertical lines (llllll) and then curves (c c c)  before putting them together to practice q q q.  

The handwriting topic dwindled after about 20 minutes.  With almost an hour left they decided to go into Classroom Management.  Another great moment as each teacher shared one thing that worked to manage their classroom (that wasn't corporal punishment).

We closed off in prayer and called it a day.

I'm always exhausted after these!  (Stress level maybe?!)

Teachers listening to a presentation about handwriting.