English Club in the vil

One of the most rewarding things I am doing in my village right now is the English Club I started about two months back.  When I arrived in Katito (my village) there were no clubs going on at the school.  Even the sports teams were not active.  My school also only holds classes until 14:00 (2:00 p.m.) so my afternoons were spent sitting on my porch reading a book.  Not that I don't love an excuse to sit around for hours with my nose in a book, but I only enjoy this for so many days in a row.  I noticed that the pupils are still in need of English improvement and practice and I needed something to do in the afternoons; so I started a Tuesday/Thursday English Club.

From 15:00-16:00 every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon I head back to the school and I meet with 10-20 pupils from grades 4-6.  At this point I am still trying to figure just what I should be teaching them, but my random "lessons" have been going well so far.  Some days I just get out a pile of books and they sit and read.  It's great to be able to show them that even if they can't read the words they can still read the book.  I sat with a table of pupils one day and we "read" a book just by looking at the pictures.  I don't think they ever knew how to just look at a book and use thier imaginations to come up with a story.  And in the same afternoon I'll have a pupil come to me and ask what a certain word is in a book they're reading.  I ask what they think it means, and we work through it together.  When they can't quite come to a answer, we get out my pocket dictionary and we look it up together. 

Recently I've been having a lot of younger pupils coming to Club, so I've been working on basic things like recognizing the letters of the alphabet. Day 1 I took out bottlecaps that had the letters of the alphabet on them, and each pupil one at a time would pick a bottlecap, tell the group the letter and then come up with an English word starting with that letter.  As the Clubs went on, we branched off from this basic skill to various activities.  One day I put them into five groups and picked a letter.  They had to tell me the letter and then come up with as many words as they could that started with that letter.  After a few rounds of this, to make it more challenging, I gave them a letter and they had to come up with one word but they had to be able to use it in a sentence.  And to add to that, if two groups had the same word neither group got points that round.  The pupils loved this activity and it made them not only work together, which they don't often do, but also think in a different manner than they are used to. 

I'm really excited that I still have almost two years to work with these pupils and see them continue to learn and improve thier English.  There is a lot I still have to learn myself so that I can best teach them, but it's great to have other PCV's around to get idea's from.  It's a beautiful thing that PC Zambia has so many volunteers so that we can work together and share ideas. 

Here are a few pictures of one of my most recent English Clubs...

Group thinking hard of what thier word and sentence will be.

Talking with one of the groups about thier list they were trying to "expand"