Sunday School: Calling the 12 Apostles

It's Sunday, so time for Bible class again! Today we were talking about Jesus calling the apostles. We played a matching game (pelmanism) with the 12 apostles as our activity today. We also enjoyed singing some of our favourite songs.  The one song that is requested every week (so now I just start with it) is My God is So Big (so strong and so mighty...).

We also practiced some new-to-us songs that we've been learning: the Sea of Galilee song (they love trying to keep up with all the hand movements) and I am a C-H-R-I-S-T-I-A-N. We also sang a song about Jesus calling the disciples, but it was set to the tune of Jesus Loves Me, so it was really easy to learn. 

I've mentioned before that I've been using the Mission Bible Class curriculum the last couple of years, although rather loosely these days as the kids in my Bible class are all twelve years old now, and we rarely have younger visitors, so we've started reading the stories directly from the Bible instead of me telling them as a story, and discussing the Bible discovery-bible-study style. One thing I really like about Mission Bible Class is that they have videos of people teaching a lot of different children's songs, so it's easy to teach new songs. 

Here is the curriculum: 

https://missionbibleclass.org/

Here are the videos:

https://youtube.com/c/MissionBibleClass

Sunday in Ngarash

It was a beautiful afternoon, so I walked home from the school today.  It takes me about an hour to make the walk if I'm not rushing.  I'd like to walk more often, but going in the morning I'm usually in a hurry, and other than on Sunday, it's usually dark by the time I leave.  It's mid-dry season here, so it's getting pretty dusty and the grass is brown.  It's still pretty cool (highs in the low 70s, so in the 60s a lot of the day, which is as cold as it gets here), though, although it should start to warm up soon. 

I like the area between the school (in the Ngarash neighborhood) and town; it's mostly farmland with the higher slopes of the mountain on one side and long views out over the valley and distance smaller mountains on the other. 

The Sun Comes Out

This is a beautiful time of year, when the rains end and the sun comes out, but it's not yet dry and dusty.  The above is on the road just outside the school gate.  Below are close to my house.

 

Student Life

A day in the life of students... in the first picture, some form two students are writing the answers to some questions I wrote on the board.

At lunchtime, I had to go up to the dining hall to find someone, and I got a couple of pictures of the normal chaos of the dining hall during lunchtime.  Ugali and beans today!

 

Peer Pressure Lesson Part 2

Today in Life Skills, the students acted out the skits I assigned last week.  We had some interesting stories about handling peer pressure! 

 

Peer Pressure Skits

In my form 1 Life Skills class, we talked about peer pressure last week. This week, I assigned each group a prompt for a skit showing different examples of peer pressure and how to handle it.  Here are the prompts:

 

 

School Days

We're reading Mabala the Farmer in Form 1 right now.  It's one of the kids' favourites of the stories we're required to read; it's about a very silly man that leaves the big city and thinks life on the farm will be easy.  His long-suffering wife tries to tell him things, but he has to make his own mistakes. 

I often take pictures of the pages on my phone to read from, as there aren't quite enough copies for everyone and that way it frees up one more. Below, Melau poses with the stack of books. 

The form one students love taking silly pictures, of course.  I've met very few students that don't...I can only imagine how many we'd have taken back when I was in high school if we had phone like today; we took enough as it was, but we were limited by the cost of developing film. :) 

In the late afternoon, I was watching out the library door and I saw several students gathered around the bell tower.  Mr. Mngoma, the headmaster, had some maintenance to do on a bicycle, so he brought it up there to do it so that some interested students could see the process and learn how to do some basic repairs. Nice to see students learning even outside of class! 

Friday Night Lights

We don't have class after lunch (which is from 1:00-2:00 pm) on Fridays.  The afternoon time is for clubs, family groups (small groups led by teachers/staff that are in charge of cleaning certain areas of the grounds as well as meeting for various discussions of life skills sorts of topics not covered in class), or other school events like debates with other schools.  The science club meets in the library, led by form four students Baton and Shuaka.  Sometimes, they ask to borrow my laptop to play educational videos.  

On Friday evenings (about 5:00 pm to 6:30) we have football (what you call soccer), which is the BIG sport here.  Sometimes, like tonight, it's teachers against students; sometime's it's one class against another, or sometimes against another school.  

Mr. Mngoma, the headmaster, was doing something or other up by the dining hall with his pickup truck.  He let some of the students have fun by piling in the back when he moved it back around to his house.  

Above, some after-football stretching. Below, here's me with form four student Elisha. 

 

Quiz Time in Form 2

We had a vocabulary quiz today in Form 2! Everyone is working hard...

...but after class, there is time for some being silly with selfies. :) Below: Doreen, Victoria, and Benson. 

 

Form Four is Working Late

The form four students have a big project due soon, so they were all in the computer lab this evening.  It's not unusual to be working in the evening; they usually have Preps (study hall) time in the evening after devotional anyhow.  It was a nice night, though, with a big, bright full moon.  I tried to get a picture looking back over the campus in the moonlight as I waited at the gate for my boda boda (motorcycle taxi) to go home.  

 

Processing New Textbooks

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, most of my free time this week is taken up by processing our new textbook shipment.  It's quite a process of stamping, labelling, and taping the books, so I'm grateful to this group of form four girls who spent their Friday afternoon in the library taping books with me. 

Also on Friday afternoons, we have club time.  Baton is the student in charge of the science club, and the students meet in the library.  He borrowed my laptop to show an educational video to the group. 

 

Invigilating Exams

Exam time again!  I have a few exams to invigilate this week.  Below, I was with form four for their English exam.  Several students had forgotten what the word 'synonym' means and tried to get me to tell them, but they had to figure it out for themselves.  That word is used from form two on, so they should know! 

 

Annual Textbook Order

Part of my job as the school librarian is to put together the annual textbook order.  We have in the budget each year funds to buy additional books and to replace books that have been destroyed, so early each year I get a list of requested books from all of the teachers.  Here in Tanzania, we have a goal of having at least one textbook of each type per every two students, which qualifies us as a high-level school.  In many schools, several students share one book, so one of our goals this year was to hit that mark with all of our major textbooks. 

Textbooks generally cost from $4 to $8 each, with a few of the higher-level ones being a bit more, so it adds up fast.  This year we spent over $1900 on books!  Running a school can be quite expensive.  (Speaking of which, if anyone wants to sponsor a student or contribute towards scholarships, let me know...) 

Making the order is just the beginning of my work.  It took a while (nearly two months!) to get our order from one of the bookstores in Arusha, but they did deliver them, so that was nice.  Fortunately, we have an empty office at the moment, so I commandeered it.  First, I had to unpack all the books and check what we received against my original order and against the receipt.  There were some books missing and a couple of things on the receipt I didn't recognize, so it took a day or two to sort that out.  The bookstore made a second delivery a couple of days later with the missing books.  

Then, the books needed to be processed.  Even with students helping, it took a couple of weeks of spending most of my time at work outside of class working on it.  First, we stamp the books with the school stamp in the front, the back, and somewhere in the middle.  Then, I write in the front cover, the last page, and on the bottom of page 50: AOCSS, Form 1, Oxford Biology, #1/20. (or whatever form/book it is).  I go through my inventory of our existing books to number books that are being added correctly.  After all of that, we completely wrap the covers in packing tape to help them last longer, as these textbooks are cheaply made paperbacks, not durable hardcovers.  

So, with several hundred books, it takes a while!  I am especially grateful for the form four girls who spent several afternoons in the library taping books with me.  

Finally, I delivered the books to the individual teachers and they added them to their inventories, as they are responsible for keeping up with their subjects' books until the end-of-the-year inventory. I enjoy working with the books, but the big annual book order is quite a job! 

 

Visit from a Former Student

A former student who graduated in our first graduating class in 2019, Faustina, came to visit the school today.  She stopped by the library to say hi and we got some selfies.  It was good to see her again.  She's from Monduli, but is studying at a pharmacy school in Moshi (three hours away) now.  I remember her as a very kind girl; once when I was revising adjectives with preform one of the questions was "___________________ is a kind person.", and several students put her name.  

Below, one of my students got a quick photo of me talking to students as they left the classroom for lunch. 

 

Back to School!

Well, the two-week Easter break is over, and it's a Monday back in class for our students.  The form one boys were still in a bit of a silly mood today.  These photos will be fun to pull out someday when they are graduating...