Week 2 in Zimbabwe 2012

Abby's sweet Grade 0 kiddos and teacher

Week 2 in Zim started with diving head first into all the schools. We went to Lukudsi and Matopo primary on Monday. We both spent the day observing again, but were easily persuaded to read books and sing songs with the kids.

Tuesday we went to Sigiti Primary. I saw a wonderful lesson where the teacher had the kids pretend to be robots who did whatever she said, a great way to teach them English. Abby quickly fell in love with her Grade 0 teacher, who was doing some wonderful things with her kids. Then we went to Silobi Secondary School and pulled some non-readers out of their Language Arts class to work on reading in small groups.

Abby doing the Hokey Pokey, a favorite! 

Wednesday while at Dobi Primary, Abby helped the Grade 0 teacher create stations where the kids worked on fine motor skills while cutting and tearing paper. Abby enjoyed seeing the kids move around the classroom and work on hands on activities!  I took a small group of kids out of the grade 1 classroom and read one of the books my students from Trinity created and "Are You my Mother" by Dr. Seuss. It was a wonderful experience. It took a little while for the kids to warm up to me, but after they did I had them act out the different animals in the book. It was a fun experience. Isotcha Primary was a similar experience! We left Wednesday very encouraged and refreshed. We also passed out supplies that we found were not being used into the classrooms. We put them in cleaned out cans so the kids could have supplies right at their fingertips everyday!

Melissa reading to Grade 1 students

Melissa and Chris with pencils and crayons

Abby and Melissa passing out pencil and crayons in cans

Thursday we went to Bulawayo to pick up a book shipment (which just happened to arrive while Abby and I were in Zim, it had been sitting in customs for 4 months!), drop Abby off at the bus station to go to Harare, and pick Elliot (an Australian guy we affectionately nicknamed Chappy) from the airport. Once we got to the house where the container filled with medical supplies and books was being held, we began to unpack the container. There were so many boxes that we knew the truck we rented was not going to hold our boxes, which was a really good thing! We worked hard moving and sorting boxes full of American textbooks, library books, and math manipulatives. Once we got home we were so tired, but our hearts were glad, thinking of all the great things the supplies would bring to the teachers. 

Friday we began sorting! It felt so overwhelming, we had no idea where to start. But we started with the textbooks, put them in piles of 10 so we could count them and give them out evenly among all the schools. 

A stack of text books

Mid sort on the veranda

Sweet Chi Chi sorting

 Saturday and Sunday Chappy, Prince, Chi Chi, and I continued to sort the books. They were such a big help. We started sorting the library books several ways. Our goal was to help each school create a library, so we were looking for books with pockets and cards in the cover. We also wanted the appropriate age level books to end up in the right schools. So we had a bunch of piles, one for each primary school, the secondary school, and books too old for either that would be given to the prison in Bulawayo. It took a while to go through the books because we all would get sucked into looking through them. Nothing warmed my heart more than to look up and see Prince and Chi Chi flipping through the pages of some of the books, engrossed in the vivid pictures jumping off the pages.

The sorting crew, Melissa, Chappy, Prince, and Chi Chi 

A slow process to sort all the books