Painting and other Shimoni activities!

This week on community hasn’t involved much teaching, but it has been activity and fun filled none the less. On Monday the other community volunteer and I got our TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) class, and learned about the right way to teach children to keep them interested. It’s harder than I thought. In the afternoon we got to lesson plan for the two adult classes that we were teaching. I must say, after trying to plan for two 1-hour classes, I admire my mother as a teacher even more then I did before. I don’t know how she is able to plan all the lessons needed for a whole year. At that evenings adult class I also discovered how small my knowledge of English grammar actually is. Most of the concepts they were going over I had never heard before. Tuesday was much the same, and we gave a presentation on childhood illnesses to the women’s group. We also had a lively debate in adult class on biodiversity.

One of the highlights of the community week for me was the painting of Base Academy. When I first went there for Wildlife Club there were stencils on the walls of trees, fish, flowers, fruits, etc, but no painting had been done yet. This week the children are on holiday, and with no classes it was a perfect time for our inner artists to come out. After getting delayed a bit because of rain we were off to Base with brushes, powder paints, water, painting clothes, and smiles.

-- Me painting the classroom walls of Base Academy --

There was quite a lot to be done, and the four of us set right to work. I was in one of the classrooms where I worked on a school bus, a car, a water jug, and a tea cup. It took a little to get into the groove of painting because the paint was quite watery and drips if you are not careful. My school bus now looks like it has an oil stain at the back from one such drip! When we went for lunch I was pleased at my work. It was relaxing to just stand and paint, and with some good tunes playing the hours flew by.

-- Dirty hands, but smiling faces, after a day painting --

After lunch I was in the main hall, where I worked on a set of human lungs, as well as some geometric shapes. By the time we left for the day the school looked very different. We had also managed to complete several fruits, a tree, a human body, a fish, a flower, both male and female human reproductive systems, and several equations for figuring out volume and area.

I loved the painting we did, and since I wasn’t able to teach a class I was happy to still be able to contribute to the schools of Shimoni.

Painting and other Shimoni activities!