Emily and Joey: ABC and All of Me Literacy Program

The Presby Primary School

Yesterday Joey came to class for a little while to take some pictures so I want to write about what Abbie and I are doing in the classrooms with the children. We are teaching a program called ABC's and All of Me, which is a literacy program that focuses on using as many senses as possible to help children with all learning styles to be able to learn.

The first section of the program, which is all that we will be able to teach because "summer vacation" (it is winter here but it is like our summer vacation) begins at the end of July, is all about learning the letter of the alphabet, the sound the letter makes, identifying words that begin with the letter, and also learning to write the letter.

The Presby Primary 1B Classroom

We have had to be very creative in a lot of aspects of the program, due to not really being aware of the situation here and what supplies would be available to us. Originally the plan was to teach small groups of children, around 12 students in each group. We also thought that the school was prepared for us to come and would have groups of students that needed the extra help ready for us. When we arrived we realized that we had assumed too much. We met with two principals for Presby Primary School and World Joy: Zion Primary School, we told them about our program and asked if we would be able to have a small group of students from either the Kindergarten (KG) or the 1st Grade (Primary 1). They were so excited to have us in their schools to teach the program that they wanted all the students to be taught.

Teaching the letter and the words to the song for T.

We started out at Presby with the Primary 1A & B Classes. The Primary 1A class has about 32 regular students and the Primary 1B class has around 26 students. Knowing that we did not have enough material for this many children we had to come up with ways to teach the program. We knew that we could teach the song with the entire class but weren't sure how to get all the students to be able to trace/write the letter. We decided that we would teach the whole class while we taught the song and then split the class into groups for the rest. We began by splitting the Presby 1A class into three groups but because the Presby 1B class was small enough we were able to do it in two groups.

Teaching Letter B to Presby Primary 1A

Teaching the Letter B Song to Zion KG- 1

One group would stay inside to trace/write the letter on a paper that was laminated so that we could use dry-erase markers and re-use the materials. While they were inside we have classical music that repeats the letter, the sound of the letter, and words from the letter song we taught them. This is to help their minds combine what the letter looks like, what the letter is, and how the letter sounds.

Our second group in the Presby 1A class, would also be inside with a blank laminated piece of paper and they had the option of drawing a picture of something that began with the letter we were learning for the day or free-hand writing the letter.

Tracing and Writing letter T in the new Notebooks

The third group in Presby 1A (and the second group in Presby 1B) would go outside for sensory learning. In the original program Melanie Herrmann has a lot of resources that she uses to do the sensory part of the program. Due to limited resources we use rocks, sticks, and dirt to accomplish the sensory activity. The children write the letter in the dirt with their fingers (both the Capital and Lower-case letter) and then they fill it in with rocks or sticks. The children actually have a lot of fun doing this, I think they enjoy it because they get out of their classroom. Either way they have a lot of fun. After the children finish writing the letter with the rocks we practice the song in the smaller group. This helps the children that are having a hard time understanding what we are saying get a more one-on-one opportunity.

Sensory Activity outside: Writing letter T using rocks

Practicing the songs in the small groups outside

At Zion the classes are even larger than the Presby classes. We are teaching the KG-1 and KG-2. The KG-1 class has the normal kindergarten aged students and also preschool aged students in the classroom. Most everyone in Abomosu works on a farm, so the mothers are on the farm and their is no one home to take care of the children. The children are sent to school, mainly to just sit/ sleep/ eat/ be babysat/ and possibly to learn what the older kindergartners are learning. This classroom has about 80 children in it. The KG-2 class has around 50 students in it. These are the older of the kindergarten aged children. Due to the large sizes of these classes we knew that we would not be able to split the classes into groups to do the writing of the letters or the sensory activities, but they were very eager to learn the songs. These classrooms have been very enjoyable for two reasons. One, the teachers are very helpful and enjoy the songs and participating (which has been very helpful and appreciated because the children have a hard time understanding our American accents, and also it is nice to have them explain what the words mean in Twi (local language) so that the children understand what the song is saying). The second reason is because the children are so excited, especially the little preschool aged children. They may not understand the words to the songs but they love trying to sing and dancing along with the rest of the class. Also, because the teachers are so willing to help, the children are well-behaved.

We wanted to implement the rest of the program at Zion in some way, so we asked the teachers if there were any students that may need extra help before they are able to move onto the next level (grade). We were allowed to take 12 students from the KG-2 class into a small room (storage room) and help them trace/write their letters. We though this would be an easy task with only 12 students but this ended up being more difficult than we planned. Not because of the children in our group but because the KG-1 class is released for break at the same time that we take the group of 12 into the small room. The children want to see what we are doing and they all want to join us, and the children in our classroom want it quiet so that they can work so the children would yell at each other to be quiet and go away while we would try to keep the door shut so that the children could focus.

We were excited to finally have figured out how to implement the program into the situation we were presented with, but we got excited too soon. The dry-erase markers are going through about 70 hands a day, so they eventually had either been hammered too hard by the children or they just dried out. We were only on letter R at Presby and letter P with our group of 12 from Zion. We wanted to finish the program with these classes so we had to be creative again. We decided that we could go to the market and buy some exercise books (really cheap notebooks, with worn out paper and missing some of the lines that should be in them). This has made preparation for classes take longer but the clean-up is easier. Clean-up had become a hassle because the erasers would get so black by the end of the day that the dry-erase markers would just smear instead of erase and it would take some time to erase all the pages between groups. Now in the exercise books we write in the traceable letters just like they had on the laminated Activity sheets and then have rooms to free-hand write the letter. We were lucky because many of the children did not complain about the change from colorful markers to pencils. We were so sad that we had to make this change but we very grateful that we have some resources to work with. A couple weeks before all the markers died we had gone to Accra and knew that some of the markers weren't working and we needed all of them in the Presby 1-A Class so that everyone had a marker while they were in the classroom. We looked all over for dry-erase markers and when we finally found some it was only a four-pack but was very expensive. We bought a pack hoping that the rest of the markers would last until the end of the program but instead they only helped keep us going for a couple more letters, which was just long enough for us to come up with a new plan of action.

Yesterday, Joey and I were walking around town and some children that are not in our classes asked if I would come teach them the songs. It has been so much fun, we can barely walk anywhere without someone singing the songs to us. The best is when it is children that are not in our classes. We were talking to our friend Joe (a boy in the village that has been teaching us Twi) and he was telling me that he has heard about what I teach the children and "how they sing a song and then you take them outside and they use the stones to write Big E and Lower-case e." He has never been around the schools while we teach so it means the children are talking to each other about the program. I always have the older girls asking if I will sing the song for them. Also, the other day I had a parent ask me why I wasn't able to teach in his daughter's class. It makes me smile that they enjoy it so much. Although I do feel bad for the next Obronis (White-People) to come here because the children will stop them and start singing the song to them hoping that they will sing it back to them and they will not be able to. The children assume that if one white person knows something then they all do. When we first got hear a group of nurses from BYU were here and they had gone to the schools and taught the children songs about brushing their teeth and washing their hands, so the children would sing these songs to us hoping that we would sing with them but we did not know the songs.

Teaching Mary how to write the Alphabet using the Big Book (She is the daughter of one of the Loan recipients, she came over with him to talk to Joey and Spencer about his business plan and I wanted to help entertain her so I pulled out the markers and the Big Book)

I have learned a lot about myself while I have been here. I had never wanted be a teacher, especially a classroom teacher, but I am very glad that I have had this opportunity. It has been an amazing experience to see children learn and grow through something that you are teaching them. The children always brighten my day, whenever I am having a bad day and I see a child smile I feel so much better. I still don't want to be a classroom teacher but I have learned a lot about how children learn and how they need encouragement and need to have fun while they learn.