Mamelodi Primary School

I do have some new News for everyone. As most of you knew I was volunteering weekly at Mamelodi a township school, but now I am doing an internship there this semester.  I am working with twelve fourth grade boys.  Their teacher told me these boys have had some behavioral issues in class and are currently behind.  I was told that up to two years ago teachers were able to hit students that misbehaved. Now that it is against the law, teachers are struggling with classroom behavior and management. The teachers want me to work with and teach these boys English.  At Mamelodi, the children are taught in the language Zulu.  The students do not start to learn English until the fourth grade.  In South Africa their semesters are different from ours, so their first semester just started in January.  This means that my students hardly know any English if any at all.  My first day was quite interesting to say the least.  I did not know they didn’t know English, until I had so many clueless faces.  We had ourselves a bit of a language barrier, but one of the boys helped me translate.   This Tuesday I taught my first lesson.  One of my friends that lives in my residence speaks Zulu, so he had to teach me some words.  Since I do not know my students very well yet, I wanted to do a lesson that would help them get to know me and let me get to know them.  I did a family tree activity.  I translated all of the different family members in Zulu and then in English.  I then had them make a tree with all of their family members and then share to the rest of us their family in English.  The activity went very well.  The boys seemed to really enjoy getting to use markers, colored paper etc.  Normally in their classrooms they just listen to the teacher.  This is mainly because they are limited with the supplies they have.  When I was leaving for the day their teacher came up to me and asked me what the students and I had done for the day.  I explained to her and then with a big smile on her face she said “I have never seen that much excitement on their faces”.  This motivated me a little bit more.  In the weeks ahead, I have many more lessons to come.  I am trying to plan activities for them to learn in a way that they have never learned before.