Week three was another great and successful week!
Even though it is summer holidays, lots of knowledge-hungry kids show up everyday at the École Mamiko summer camp. Since we have to handle different age groups at the same time, which means different skill levels, we decided to adjust our morning routine accordingly. We still start with reading a story every morning - on Thursday even without Malagasy translation! - and focus on the vocabulary and make sure the children learn how to follow and summarize the content of a story. Then we split up into different age groups and do activities suitable to each level. Furthermore, we kept on giving reading support and even did a few French language classes, based on the difficulties and problems we saw the kids running into daily. We realized that if we wanted them to improve we had to take a few steps back and teach some basics again. On Friday for example we did a class on phoenetics which helped to correct some misunderstandings. The following week we will probably do some conjugations of verbs.
The afternoons on the other hand felt without exception exciting! On Monday we started practicing for our little concert that we will give in three weeks. The children will sing songs and clap some super cool rhytms. We would like to present a mix between harmonic songs and rythmic claps and stomps.
For the art afternoon we decided to make water colours from plants. The night before we had a lot of fun testing if it worked and it did! The children were at least as excited as we were and drew a lot of wonderful paintings as our pictures show! To make it even more interesting we also let them draw with coal.
Also the sports afternoon went great. As we are four volunteers now, and with the awesome help of Storya, it is way easier to handle the big numbers of kids. For them it was also more fun as they didn't have to wait too long anymore until it was their turn.
To do a science afternoon with many different age groups is a bit more challanging. However, we came up with a fun idea to teach them about the five senses. We started with a introduction in the class room, where we asked them about the five senses and for examples of their everyday life. To then make the lesson more exciting we built five stations for them to experience their own senses. The children loved tasting the sugar and the lemom juice or to smell the cinnamon! We were really happy about the great day we had.
Now we are going to enjoy our weekend and we are already excited about all the cool things we will be able to do with the kids next week!
Greetings from Djangoa!
Alessandra, Mariana, Natalie and Nina
