Guest blog by Karen

It's amazing the people you meet and the opportunities that arise when you engage in conversation on your travels. Met a group from Team schools and IUE university who are  volunteering to teach as part of the Global village initiative, so I invited myself along for the morning.  Little did I know at the end I would be a guest speaker and have to critique the lessons I saw.

At 9am ten students from IUE and two students from Team high school New Jersey began teaching three classes of around forty children on a rota basis. Lessons were 55 minutes each, one on writing, one reading and one vocab taught  kinaesthetically all based around a story written by one of last year's students. This year's theme was the elephant and the fly which the Rwandan students will perform as a play on the last day of school.

The Rwandan students have to pay a small amount for the classes to show commitment, something none of them are short of...imagine a class of 40 English students working solidly for three hours in their summer holiday - I had difficulty when I thought of some of my students. I digress....in the kinaesthetic class the students played charades and Simon says based on verbs some of them knew and verbs from the story. This was to ensure they understood the meaning of the words. In the writing class they were using a grid to start to plan their own stories, characters/setting/problem/solution, some of the older students in English, some in a mixture of kinyarwanda and  English. They then shared and one of the Rwandan teacher volunteers translated if  needed. The reading group had the students repeating the story, acting out key words before writing them into the books and pens donated from fundraised money back in America.

All of the lessons had an interactive element and the smiles from the students indicated they were enjoying their learning. The most powerful scene was the Rwandan teachers joining in with enthusiasm and learning new techniques. The whole process repeated in the afternoon with a new cohort of students most of whom arrived an hour early. It is not often you can spend a day where every individual is learning all at the same time and so obviously enjoying themselves.