My Ghana Trip

Today started with the usual wakeup call of the rooster around 6 am, lovely. We go to bed listening to the bullfrogs (what must be hundreds of them in the lagoon behind us, and wake up to the rooster—I actually think I will miss those sounds when I go). After the Lagoon Lodge’s famous omelet breakfast (they use Gouda, yum) it was off to school to begin the workshops. I will apologize now to those who are reading this in order to check up on my activities here because I am about to talk about teacher stuff that might get boring (I am using this blog and flicker sites-if I ever get them running- for my documentation panel for the class associated with this trip). Before we began the day, I offered the morning prayer (yes they pray in all of their schools, and yes I said it –over a microphone no less- don’t be so surprised). (BTW I also took the lead at yesterday afternoon’s general session and used a microphone-I am like a regular emceeJ).

We organized the workshops by breaking the large group of attendees into 4 smaller groups that rotated around through each workshop. My group presented two reading strategies that teachers could use to aid in comprehension as well as engage their students in reading. We first read them a poem, Wee Willie Winkie, and then showed them how students can use a graphic organizer to draw pictures of the sequence of the poem (or book). We had them do the exercise, and they had to draw pictures to summarize the poem, cut out the pictures and glue them down in sequence, and write the sentence next to each picture. The pictures help students to use their artistic side to summarize or retell the story, and understand the sequence of the story. It also helps them remember what they read and allows the teacher to understand whether or not they have comprehended the story. Everyone took their time with their pictures. I have said it before, but they take such pride in their work and take the time to do things right—our American students would have taken half the time, and probably do half of the job. They all seemed to enjoy this activity and it was interesting to see how prior knowledge came into play with the pictures. For one of the items they had to draw Willie running through the town and they drew palm trees and chickens—you know what you know and that is how you comprehend a text. Fascinating.

Next we switched to an even more hands on activity- making instruments out of stuff that we would normally throw away, decorating them, and reading the poem again-this time tapping out the syllables and putting it to music so they have another way to comprehend, understand, and remember the story. They went wild-all of them, teachers and students, many made three or four instruments and we could not tear them away from the stickers and other decorations. They got a huge kick out of spelling out their names with stickers (and there is a very neat way they are named- I’ll pop that in another entry, though)- they don’t get to work with these items often, some of them had to be shown how to use a glue stick. Goodness- what we take for granted in the US- and these people are lucky to get books in their schools or if they have them they don’t have space to put them and they stay in boxes (anyone feel like joining us to raise money to build a school library here—seriously). I promise to get some pictures up soon- internet is really slow—and I have some great stuff from our workshop as well as the other team members. Our other team members offered strategies for predicting outcomes in a story, making a story come alive with drama, and looking at different perspectives of the same story and what makes them different. I think the teachers got a lot out of what we showed them and I hope that they can use some of it in their classrooms. We will present these same workshops again on Thursday—we get the day off tomorrow because it’s a public holiday-Republic Day (in 1960 they became a republic)—their independence day is in March.

We were also able to present another general session workshop in the afternoon- we taught them the cloze strategy, a language experience strategy. Two of our team members took a book and wrote the words out but left blanks throughout so the teachers and students had to figure out what kinds of words would fit in the blanks. A true cloze strategy is supposed to leave every 7^th word blank but we morphed it a bit. They had a ball and we split them into 4 groups to try and figure out the words. Watching them work together was awesome—they used different ways of finding words-context, figuring out which type of word fit (past tense, adjective…) and then filling it in, or reading through all of the story first to figure out what happened before filling in the blanks. This would be a great strategy to use in their classrooms and hopefully they will use it again-it engaged them and they had fun coming up with answers together.

I hope to post pictures and video soon- tomorrow we are going to trek to the ocean, not a long walk, but we pass through a fishing village and from what I understand get a true sense of Africa so I am excited. One quick note that is kind of ironic- I am sure you know, but the President is due here next Thursday and he will be passing through one of the local roads on his way to the Cape Coast (the people here are pretty excited)- everyone is supposed to line the streets to cheer him on-maybe we will be amongst the schoolchildren waving-Problem is he leaves the same day we do from the same airport and every time I tell people when we are leaving they laugh—airport security will stink and we might even be delayed—cross your fingers! We also finally got to check the news today and amidst the tragedy found out that we are withdrawing from Iraq—getting the news was surreal and it reminded us that we are a world away from all we know—we miss the US but wouldn’t trade this experience for the world!

~ by cferber on July 1, 2009.

Ghana