World Water Day

22 March

Mastery Reading

The day after Rimdu and before World Water Day was a bit chaotic, with students all over the place, making lots of noise and supposedly cleaning.

I had my first session of “Mastery Reading” and it seemed to go well.  Most of my older students showed up and happily read their books to the younger ones, the younger ones enjoying it greatly.  I spoke with the older students after, and they all gave positive feedback, of course, and said they would change over their books.  I did not see many during the following week, unfortunately.  Trish has offered to continue the program and hopefully will have more success in being able to call the older individuals for reading practice – it is helpful to know them!

Mastery Reading

I thought my class 6 lesson, teaching them to write a decent paragraph went quite well, but a subsequent lesson late in the afternoon, when I asked them to put their learning into place and write a paragraph on their own suggested that not all had got what I’d been trying to teach!

Class 8 with verbs was great after I sent the class captain to ask those responsible to save a quantity of “chocolates” – the goodies that had been offered during Rimdu and were now being shared out amongst the students.

My artwork for our World Water Day Presentation

We were asked to judge the “Nature for Water” poster competition, by giving a mark out of 10 against a number of criteria for each poster.  I found it a bit challenging, especially with the coordinator’s class 2 son singing a very irritating and repetitive song that Joan had taught them! I noted that the scores from the 3 of us varied considerably!

Once our school tasks were over, we adjourned for a gin and tonic and to discuss our own presentation for the following morning’s World Water Day assembly.  We rehearsed our presentation which seemed to be a bit slapstick at times, but on the day it went reasonably – students talked through it, as they did through many other presenters. 

Exercising more of my non-artistic talents

I had found a small group of Class 8C girls before school and asked them to find 2 tall boys (not being sexist here, but the tall boys are way taller than the girls) for their help in holding up posters on cue.  Our demo of the distance from a river for a bush toilet stop seemed successful as the students counted Joan’s steps to illustrate 50 metres and tried to stand to watch her as she disappeared behind the admin building, but were told by Sonam, Sir to sit down.  Joan’s final song with them went well, although the wretched tune is recurring in my brain!  

Mathematically correct representation!

A presentation by one staff member on litter and pollution of the valley affecting the black necked cranes was rather amusing -  it took me a while to realize he was saying “necked” rather than “naked” and I subsequently found out that other staff had teased  him about this!  At least one student heard it as “naked” and recycled that in her writing the next day!

More creativity ????

I ended up with only one class, as the older students were sent to clean the water source up the valley or gather pine needles as garden mulch from the forest.  I wrestled a bit with them over “bossy e” and we resorted to saying the vowel, then the first letter of the word and the vowel, and then the whole word.  It seemed to work as the next day they raced through the word list, mostly getting it correct first time. 

I spent a fair bit of time just preparing for the next few lessons, correcting notebooks and preparing required forms for the reading poster competition judging, but by the end of the day still had a fair bit to do, including preparing the PD for Friday.  It would be on gifted children and it rather tickled my sense of humour to be doing a gifted PD in Bhutan during Australia’s Gifted Awareness Week!