GVI Teaching in Mombasa

GVI Teaching in Mombasa

After a 2 week community development project in Shimoni, I have am now on the Mombasa teaching project. We teach at two schools here in Mombasa. I am at Olives Rehabilitation Centre for disadvantaged children, which has grown from a small school of 60 to a school of 450 students.  We are now preparing students to sit their Kenyan Certificate of Primary Education which is crucial to the life chances for students in gaining employment and progressing to secondary and later education here in Kenya. GVI does English, English literature, creative arts, one to one reading, group reading and PE. I am teaching Standard 6 and I absolutely love it. The experience from the Shimoni teaching project was invaluable for lesson planning and having the confidence needed to take lessons on my own here at Olives.

Standard 6

First I reviewed the basics with them, verbs, nouns and adjectives. This week we have worked on the simple past tense. We began with regular verbs, going over the ‘ed ‘and ‘ied’ rule. I can now walk in to classroom and say “what’s the rule?” and they all call back in unison “ ED or IED Madame Leyla!”. Next we went on to the irregular verbs, where we did various activities such as finding the verbs in passages and changing them to the past. To finish the unit I got them to write their own creative story in the past tense. Reading their stories was great because in just a few lessons I could already see the improvement many of them had made, not only in their sentence structure but in their confidence to use many regular and irregular past tense verbs to tell their stories. I even made an appearance in some!

Volunteer Leyla reading with Standard 6

Group reading and one to one reading is a really wonderful part of the Olives experience. I have 2 groups of four children that I take twice a week and 4 children that I take individually 3-4 times a week who need extra practice and assistance in improving their English reading and comprehension skills. This is a great way to get to know the students and build their respect while providing them with a comfortable learning atmosphere where they can ask questions and improve their sounding out skills.

One to One Reading

Group Reading

We have been taking the Olives students out for PE lessons at least twice a week which I have found really fun and a great way to bond with the children and get to know their individual personalities better. Often the boys want to play football, so one of the volunteers bought some Hula hoops and skipping ropes to get the girls involved too. The girls have also been teaching me some Swahili song and dances and in turn I have been showing them some English ones. We even combined them with a bit of Lion King ‘Hakuna Matata’. It has taken me two weeks but I have also now proven to the boys that females can play football too!

Currently I doing a creative arts project for Standard 6. We are making piñatas for the last day that the volunteers are here. First we split into groups and designed a piñata, from faces, flowers and animals to sports balls, food and a globe. Then we did the paper mache and then  we  decorated them ready for Friday afternoon’s game of piñata.

Making Pinatas

I absolutely love my class. They always greet me with smiling faces and are willing to learn and engage in the material. My job is to keep the lessons interesting and fun. Teaching here at Olives has been both a wonderful and humbling experience that I wouldn’t give back for anything. The hardest part will be leaving  but I’m sure this won’t be the last time I see them.

By Volunteer Leyla Isin

GVI Teaching in Mombasa