Teacher bootcamp! We’ve spent the past three weeks at a
primary teacher college called Shimoni. For the first week we had trainings
around how to implement reading interventions focusing on phonemic awareness,
alphabetic principle, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. It has been a
learning process for all of us! Some of my pre-school knowledge around lesson
planning and classroom management has been put to use but it has been really
exciting to learn all of the literacy stuff from the ground up.
So then for the past two weeks, we have gone to a Kira
primary school to practice our new skills. We are a little under an hour north
of the capital, Kampala, so Kira is basically a suburb and as a result, the
pupils at Kira are all very advanced academically. The children in P4 that I
will be working with at my site will have no English but the children in P4 at
Kira could all speak English and read rather proficiently. Their comprehension
skills were a little low because the children are taught mostly by memorization
and regurgitation. So it was really fun to go into the school and implement
different teaching techniques. The children were all so excited to learn and
the Ugandan teachers were also very eager to participate and learn.
We were each assigned a small group in our class to teach
specific interventions and smaller reading activities. I was assigned the green
group and had the pupils teach me the Luganda word for green- Kiragala. It is
pronounced “Chi-la-ga-la.” The pupils thought it was so funny that I asked and
then whenever we had to walk to a different classroom or outside we would all
chant “Kirlagala!”
