Tuesday, July 6, 2010

The Eets-Beets Spider

After arriving home from a fun weekend in Entebbe/Kampala it was wonderful to find that water is back in Bukasa! woooo!
Every one has already talked all about the safari, so I don't need to say too much, but it was amazing! I had been dreaming of going on a safari for the good part of my 19 years on earth and last weekend it finally happened... The only thing we missed was a lion, but we saw every thing else!
Last week I got a mild case of malaria, which put a slight damper on things. I felt pretty sick for a couple days, but because I have been taking my malarone, it wasn't too bad. Besides my sickness, we had a good week at work. We taught, as usual, and worked on a newsletter for Kyetume CBHC. Even though the computer program we used was pretty frustrating, I had a lot of fun designing and organizing the newsletter. I was on the newspaper staff all 4 years in high school, so it's always been something that I've enjoyed doing.
This weekend was awesome. We went to Aero Beach with our "mom" and a 4 year old that lives near where we work named Tracy. They both were thrilled to take a day trip, and we all really enjoyed it, too. After a day at the beach we went to Kampala for the Fourth of July! I got all of my gift shopping done and am really excited about the things I got. I don't think I'm cut-throat enough for the markets... I am a bit of a push over when it comes to prices, so it was nice to have people like Regina around to help me with the whole bartering thing :).
This morning I taught my P4 class again. Their teacher was sick with malaria, so I basically was on my own for 4 hours. She wanted me to teach them a song, so I went with "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," and the kids loved it. It was SO funny to hear them try and pronounce the words "Itsy" and "Bitsy" (it came out as "eets-beets"), and they thought it was even more funny to hear me try and sing the high notes.
Afterwards, I taught them their science lesson, which was about interdependence among animals. As part of my lesson on predators and prey, I let them draw pictures of different predator/prey relationships. I didn't realize how excited they would be to have some sort of creative outlet and it was very interesting to see the different creativity levels. One kid, who the teacher has clearly identified as one of the slower kids in class, drew an amazing picture and clearly mastered the ideas of parasites, predators, and prey by being able to draw them and see a visual representation. Kids all learn in such different ways, and it is a shame that many schools don't have the materials necessary to meet the different needs of these different learning styles.
Later on today we are going to get the paint for the clinic and will hopefully start painting tomorrow. I will try to update this again later on this week, but only one computer at work has internet, so it's pretty hard to update as often as I want to.

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