Did I do it right?

Slice of Life Challenge #Day 19

A puzzled look, a definite sense of uncertainty…Their routine has been challenged and these young kids seem a bit bemused. They pull their shabby, dog-eared notebooks out of their backpacks (usually with a broken zip that’s stuck halfway) and hand over their homework with a bit of a question mark in their expressions. This is not our normal class room procedure.

Yesterday I gave two different story prompts according to class level, for them to take home.

For the two younger classes who have done only a little free writing practice, I wrote on the board, ‘On my way home I found a ……’ and explained that they needed to think of something they might find along the way and make up a little story around that.

One hand immediately shot up, “Do we need to bring what we find to school tomorrow?”

Okay, maybe I should have explained the sentence starter a little more carefully! I went over it again.

But this morning, most of them handed in their work with some kind of story. ‘On my way home I found a red shaped like a heart stone.’ ‘…a chicken with white feathers.’ .’..lots of coloured fish in the river…’ So today some students who did not go any further, need to tell me what they did with their object to complete the story. The others have a fresh prompt.

The other story starter was: ‘The boy jumped up and ran out of the door…’ For several of the older group, particularly the boys, he ran out to play a game of football (a favourite sport around here) and of course was on the winning team and scored all the goals. But one student had him tripping down the stairs and hurting his leg, so the moral delivered by his mother was to walk and not run everywhere. I distinctly hear a teacher’s voice in that tale (Walk, don’t run!)

I’m impressed overall as English is not their first language and they don’t speak it at all except at school. So I’m definitely looking forward to tomorrow’s stories!

In case you’re wondering why they are coming into school (just for an hour), it’s because our school was in the middle of doing tests, when schools were closed down on Tuesday and so we were given special permission to finish off the testing up until Friday. Testing works its own magic as an essential assessment in this country and we do only have 60 students overall.

Next week our teachers will be going around and visiting students in their homes to help them keep studying. It’s going to be interesting to see how that goes.