Kiragala! (Chi- la- ga-la)

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!”