24th Oct 2:30pm

After lessons the children have porridge at 10:30am, they have a cup of watery porridge (not made out of oats I don’t think) and they sit on the steps in the central area of the school. All the children love sitting out and running around, and we play games with them or sit and chat to the ones who have better English.

When I came back up to the volunteer house Megan and Kristina had baked a cake with the supplies we had got, so Alex will have his cake tonight with all the children.

After porridge I went into standard 3 maths (not intentionally repeating classes) and helped the kids with addition, I did some marking and then any that were incorrect I went through other examples with them, One girl was particularly stuck and I sat with her for a while. Her English was pretty non-existent, so I hope the examples were helpful since numbers and symbols are universal.

One thing that made maths really hard for me to help with, was the way most Tanzanians add ‘ee’ sounds to the end of words. So 8 x 10 = 80 = ‘eightee’ but 18 – 10 = 8 = ‘eightee’

This made life much more difficult; even the teachers do it – ‘blackboardee’. I don’t know why but I’m going to attempt to get them out of the habit.

24th Oct 10:10am

I got up this morning, had breakfast and went to help in morning classes. The first class i went to was standard 3 maths, there were about 30 students in the class. The teacher came in and the whole class, in unison, sat down and said 'Good morning teacher Rafael'. He started doing revision of multiplication. There methods are pretty weird, they write it in the same way we were taught divides, so for 11 x 4, the method is

11                    1) 1x4=4

X4                   2) 1x4=4

44

For 18 x 7 the method is

⁵18                  1) 8x7=56      carry the 5

X7                   2) (1x7) +5 = 12

126

The children are well behaved but they get over excited easily, so the teacher, Rafael (who they call teacher) has to tell them to be quiet all the time. When he asked a question all the children would throw their hands as high as they could, shake them about, clicking or snapping, stand up, lean forward and shout 'teacher teacher,' they are so keen to learn, it’s refreshing.

Some of the 10 times table were difficult for the children, so I taught them some new methods, which they seemed to understand well, which was really nice. Sometimes when children don't understand, the best thing to do is explain a different way, so they are more likely to find something easier in one method that another.

After that i went to baby class and helped them with jigsaws of the alphabet. I joined a group and we made the jigsaw, and then went through the alphabet letter by letter, helping them with their pronunciation. Then we went through each corresponding word for each letter. They struggled with violin and gate, so i split up the words into vi-oh-lin and they began to say it properly.