Tuesday, August 21, 2012

A Journey Into Space (sort of...)


A Journey Into Space (sort of...)



We have been volunteering with GVI for the last four weeks in Standard 5 at Precious Vision Care Centre.  Whilst trying to find an inventive way of helping our class learn how to write compositions we stumbled across a photo of Chinese people in space suits...
We decided to show this to our class, as we knew that they were interested in space, and get them to write a short story.  We had given them compositions to write before but we wanted to see if they could be creative a write a story.  The task was that they had to come up with a story about what they saw in the picture. 
Volunteers Elana and Andy used pictures instead of words
 We gave them a lot of freedom about what they could wirte, but many struggled without solid guidelines.  Many of them initially wrote compositions about Chinese people and Kung Fu.  They also kept asking us questions about the picture to see if they could find out any more information about the picture.  We kept telling them that there was no worng answer and that they could wirte anything they wanted, but this confused them further...

Volunteer Elana with students from Standard Five

However, some took to it more easily than others and began writing lengthy stories about space travel with compelling plots.  Even those that struggled began to understand, by the end, the difference between a composition and a story.
One of the best stories we had was from a boy called Joel K.  He wrote about a poor family living in Japan (the capital of China).  The rich man told his father that if he could successfully travel to space and return home safely he would make his family rich.  After having a space adventure and meeting aliens the man returned home safely where he became rich and famous.  The family was never hungry again!
Volunteer Andy with students from Standard Five
 
It was surprising to see how much some of our students struggled with the assignment.  We thought that using their imaginations would come naturally to all of them, instead of just a few.  But in the end, most of the class had caught on and wrote creative and intersting stories.



Elana and Andy, GVI Volunteers.

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