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.