Story Time

Hopefully we will be having another Skype conference with Key School on Thursday between the 4th grade class at Key and a group of 5th graders here at Chumbageni Primary School. The topic of this Skype conversation will be food, so I am hoping to spend some time preparing with the students before the meeting.

The teacher who will help facilitate the conference is the 5th grade English teacher. I joined her in class today thinking that we would be reviewing some English related to food, but we instead just proceeded with their syllabus. They were working on reading comprehension and focusing on a story about a woman who successfully stops a thief who is running away with stolen goods.

The students initially struggled to read the passage, managing to pronounce the syllables and words but not necessarily grasping the meaning of the sentences. After reading the story two times, they still were not able to answer the basic questions that accompanied the story or find the answer in the passage.

In the middle of one of these comprehension questions, the teacher got a phone call and stepped out to answer it. I waited for a few minutes for her to return, but when she didn’t I decided that I might as well proceed with the lesson. The story was actually pretty entertaining and relatively simple to act out, so I got to work.

I asked for seven students to come up and play the role of an old woman, two cows, a thief, and two victims. We then walked through the story line by line with mooing cows, screaming victims, the old woman gasping with fear, and the thief finally tripping over a bundle of grass, hitting his head on a rock, and being taken to jail. The kids were laughing as I proceeded to embarrass myself with a variety of sound effects and stunts.

The teacher returned part way through our second rehearsal and I went to go sit down. Seeing what we were doing, she decided to let me continue and started helping by translating some key words in the story and helping the kids in Kiswahili when they didn’t understand what we were saying. We were all getting into the story and having a great time, and after our fourth run-through of the story we stopped to go over the remaining comprehension questions – and guess what? Almost every kid had their hand in the air wanting to answer the questions, and all of their responses were 100% correct.

I am now completely hoarse, but it was totally worth it.