Thursday, September 15, 2011

A new school year!!

Well it's been 6 months so I thought it was about time to update this thing.
School started this week, today is day three. I have a feeling that it’s going to be a great year!
Now for the last 6 months. It’s been crazy! Jackie came for like 10 days and it was awesome. We had a blast and ate like kings! Than three weeks after she left my parents and Bobby came for a visit. Once again we had a blast and ate like kings! I than spent the summer doing... a lot of relaxing. I spent a ton of time with my host family which was really nice. I also went on a few relaxing weekend get a ways. The end of school last year was crazy stressful so a month off was just what I needed. But don't worry I did do some work. I read with kids and prepared for this school year.
Here is something I'm really excited about. This year at school we are implementing two new reading programs. The first one is DEAR. That stands for Drop Everything And Read. When school starts again after lunch at 1pm every teacher in the school will do a read aloud for ten minutes, then everyone in the school will do silent reading for 20, including the teachers. I'm really excited about this. I have a friend in a village in the far south that tried this at her school and it worked wonders. (update: everyone is loving this!! The teachers are really getting into their read alouds and the students are loving the reading, always coming to ask for a good book!!)
The second program is more of a contest, I think when I did it in school it was call "book it" it was sponsored by Pizza Hut. Clearly.. here it is not… Basically the kids keep track of all the time they spend reading outside of school. At the end of the month everyone adds up the time and if we meet our goal everyone gets a prize. The prize is going to be something fun, an extra gym class or a movie afternoon. The point is to simple get them to read more. The more they read the better they will get. I'm also hoping by them reading for fun and not a history book they might also learn to enjoy reading.
We started these both on Monday so we'll see how well they will work. Another thing I'll be doing this year is more testing. Last year, I testing almost every student on their reading level. This year the ministry of education wants all students to be tested, however this year I will not be doing the testing. The teachers will be and I'll be teaching them how to do it! Which is awesome, it's exactly what Peace Corps is all about, transfering skills. Well Goal one anyway.
I hope to spend most of this upcoming year in classrooms helping out teachers. Many of the teachers seem very open to this idea so I'm excited for that! A few teachers are on internship and doing a great job but they are excited to learn more! There are also two new teachers who have never taught before and hopefully I’ll be able to work with them a bit.
Another really exciting thing that is happening is our library is finally opening!!! As some of you know when I came to Hopkins there was already a Peace Corps volunteer here. She was running the library, by herself. When she left she left the keys with me. I wanted NOTHING to do with it!! However I REALLY wanted to see it open and being used! After months of searching and looking I found a woman in the community that was very excited to get in there and take care of business. Her along with 3 other women have formed a library board and taken it over. I am still on the support committee and still helping them. So far they can cleaned and repaired things and reorganized the library. Currently they are working on cataloging all the books. On October 1st we will have a grand opening!! From now on everyone will have to sign up for a membership. This will be free for children and a dollar a year for adults with a onetime fee of $5 for a card. That’s right they are going crazy!! Real library cards and a computer system for checking out books! Thanks to a great donation they are getting 4 new laptops and internet. Once they are open they will begin computer classes, films class, reading group for adult, kids story time and reduced cost of internet for those in school. I’m really excited for this and so happy that the library will be open again!
On a non-school related note: my birthday!! I’m not a huge fan of making my birthday into a big deal but this year it was great!! I was forced, well strongly encouraged to have a party. Derrick took care of everything a head of time and cooked for us. Laura and Amy (two other pcvs) were in charge of everything else.. Including making almost 50 tortillas!!! We BBQed and sat around and drank. It was great and I’m so glad that they made me do it! Than for my birthday dinner they treated me to a pizza dinner!! Yum!!!
So all is well here! School is great, life is great! Also I’ll try to put up some new pictures this afternoon and post again before 6 months!
(by the way I wrote most of this last week!)

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