250 children and a blackboard under a tree

Some of you might remember a facebook status entry on 20th October...150 children under a tree, one teacher (with a sick child tied on her back), one blackboard, one stick of chalk, one pointer, and only one counting activity! I had made a few suggestions and said I would come back and do a demo lesson when I was next around.
Well, this school (and this teacher in particular) was really playing on my mind. Soon after my first visit I had started collecting resources. I saved empty tins and metal bottle tops, which I wrote on inside with a black marker pen. I put letters on some, shapes and numbers on others and devised sorting and matching activities. I collected sticks and made some into bundles of ten and found an assortment of similar sized stones. I then offered to go back and teach a lesson for them.

Armed with my resources and some balloons and puppets that I had brought from home, I got on my bicycle and arrived at the school at 8.30am. The children were still sweeping the compound but we were warmly greeted by the staff who were happy that I had come with some new ideas. The 150 KG1 kids (aged from 4 years) were rounded up under the tree. It then became obvious that the two KG2 class teachers would also like to watch and were quite happy to leave their hundred or so kids to their own devices, so I invited them to join us. It was now definitely feeling more like a Maths assembly with about 250 children sat on the ground in front of me.

I launched in with some missing numbers, counting on fingers, counting forwards and backwards (we pretended to be rockets but I suspect most of the children hadn't got a clue what a rocket was!). We found different ways of making six with our fingers, we sang 12345 and "One man went to farm, went to farm a field (an adaptation of "One man went to mow" which had been suggested for the african context, but not only did they not understand "field", most mampruli speakers seem to find it impossible to pronounce the word). Anyway, we bashed on...remember these children speak very little english so all my efforts had to be transated. Also, they are trained to repeat whatever the teacher says so we had some hilarious moments when they repeated all my instructions.

We did dropping metal bottle tops into a tin (a challenge in the outdoors with so many children).

By this time it was break and we were gathering quite an audience of older children keen to see what the nutty "sulaminga" (white person) was up to.

The Head teacher Madam Christiana was delighted with what was going on. She very kindly took some photos for me (just to prove that I am actually teaching some children out here) and then was very disappointed that she wasn't going to be in the pictures so I had to quickly take some of her. She is the lady in the yellow dress with the spotty dog puppet on her hand.

Our session had lasted over an hour and the children had been great. To conclude, they sang me a mampruli thank you song. I was then able to chat a bit to the Head and teachers and pass on some materials about mental maths activities that had been compiled by a VSO volunteer in another region. The staff have promised to collect loads more resources and use some of the ideas. I have promised them another visit soon to see how things are going. My parting words were that "learning really ought to be fun!!" (Understandably, given the conditions, sometimes it feels like a bit of an ordeal out here). The Head thought about this and said "Yes, it's true, learning should be fun."