Thursday, October 22, 2015

Status Report

We have been in school now for 2 months and have made some progress in all different areas of the school! We are happy to keep checking off things on our school year to do list! Here is a brief overview of what we have been able to achieve over the last 8 weeks!
    >Each student in our school has access to at least one pencil, pencil sharpener, eraser, pen, and exercise book. Each teacher has received a class set of these utensils to ensure students have everything they physically need to be successful in the classroom setting.
          
          >Thanks to some generous donations we have purchased new desks for every classroom in our school (KG1-JHS Form 1). There is a carpenter in Asikuma that hand makes each desk and bench for our school. He has already completed the desks for JHS Form 1. P6, P5, P4, and P3. He is currently working on completing the regular desks and benches for P2 and P1. Once these are finished he will start working on 10 round tables for our Kindergarten (KG1 and KG2) classrooms as well as 60 tiny little chairs for our pupils to sit in!

         >Our teachers have started lesson planning! Lesson preparation is so important, which is why we have stressed to teachers that they need to be completing their Lesson Notes everyday for every subject. Although some of our teachers are having a little trouble with the format and concept of planning a lesson before teaching the lesson, they are trying!

         >We meet with out teachers outside of school twice a month for professional development. This time is so important for our school staff.  It allows for us to check in with our teachers and it gives them a time where they can ask questions, share their comments and concerns with us. We love talking shop with our teachers and demonstrating different techniques for them. So far we have covered reading strategies, how to teach vocabulary, time management, and classroom management. We will continue talking about classroom management at our teaching seminar this week since there is so much that can fall under this topic!

    ·        >Since we started the seminars with our teachers have slowly started to incorporate these techniques into their classrooms! We have seen our teachers start using informal assessments, think-pair-shares, preteaching vocabulary, using key sentence frames, adding visuals on their classroom walls and adding them to their daily teaching, bringing in things like sticks and stones to use as a math manipulative, taking multiple student answers to in class questions, having students collaborate in small groups, and bringing in TLM (Teacher Learning Materials) that help to enhance their lessons and their students understanding.

    >Each child who lives in the mission center has a uniform to wear to school everyday! This may seems like an easy task, but I assure you it was not! Before we arrived in August someone had donated money to make uniforms for the children who were currently living in the mission center, which is amazing! Since we have had so many kids join us at the mission center we were short a handful of uniforms. People are probably thinking why didn’t you go to the uniform shop and just pick up a few more uniforms? It is not that simple here. In Ghana each school has a different uniform, our uniform was designed by Wisdom! So each uniform is hand crafted for a certain child. This means that a seamstress has to travel to the mission center and take a series of measurements for each child’s top and bottom piece of the uniform.  Someone then has to travel to Accra to gather the fabric and materials for the uniforms. Each step of this process takes time and money. The seamstress visited the mission center yesterday to take the last batch of measurements and grab the two rolls of cloth to make the Kingdom Cares Community School uniform.

          >Finally we have completed the addition onto our existing school structure. We added a new structure with two classrooms to support the P6 pupils and house our new JHS Form 1 program. JHS stands for Junior High School and Form 1 would be the first year in the program. There is also JHS Form 2 and JHS Form 3. Building this structure allowed us to better meet the needs of the students we currently have in the school program as well as expanding who our program can reach.
      
    Although their seems like a never ending list of things to do on a daily basis it is important to take a step back and look at the big picture and what we have initially accomplished. Not all of these things were the first on our to do list these are all things that needed to be done along the way. Like we said from the very beginning being flexible is very important in any school setting, but in the Ghanaian school system especially. Mary and I have had to shift our focus on what we are doing in the school a few times based on new challenges that have come up along the way.  Here are some of the big things that Mary and I are currently or constantly working on.

         >We will continue observing our teachers on a daily basis. We watch the different teacher’s methods as well as how they engage/interact with the students. We also hope that by being in the classrooms on a constant basis we will make sure the teachers feel like the are valued and supported within the school setting. This also gives us a chance to answer any last minute questions they have and grab any last minute supplies they might need such as a white board marker, colored chalk, a chalkboard ruler, etc. What we see in the classrooms also help us to pick the topics of our next seminars.

          > My good friend from Iowa who has been to Ghana a few times contacted us a few weeks back asking about the whiteboard situation in our classrooms. He visited the mission center in August and noticed that only two of our classrooms have whiteboards. The rest are still using chalkboards, which for the most part are big pieces of plywood covered in black paint. He generously donated money for each of our 10 classrooms to get a large whiteboard. We are currently working with Wisdom to get the whiteboards purchased and installed in the school!

    >We are also in the process of getting class sets of textbook for each grade. The tricky thing is each subject has a different textbook. The nice thing is once we have purchased the textbook for the subject you can use that textbook for multiple years. The first subject we are purchasing for each grade is reading. We feel that reading textbooks are the most beneficial for students to get their hands on.  It is easy for students to develop misconceptions about print if they never have a chance to hold a book and explore all of the print details.

    >When Mary and I first came to the KCC School we had planned on creating a new curriculum for the students. We quickly learned that this was not an option since our school has to report to the GES (Ghanaian Educational System) even though we are a private school. The GES supplies each school with a syllabus outlining what the students need to learn for that subject, thus dictating what the teachers need to teach. The school had also already purchased a series of textbooks that aligned with the GES syllabus.  So what Mary and I have started working on is creating and compiling a set of standards for each subject and grade that outlines what each student will need to know by the end of the year (similar to that of the Common Core). We will be looking at the syllabus supplied by the GES, the textbooks, and the Basic Education Certificate Examination. The basic Education Certificate Examination is what the students will need to pass to continue their education in Ghana. If a student does not pass this exam they will not be permitted to move on in the formal education system.

    Finally Mary and I will continue to teach lessons in the different grades and subject areas. Sometimes we teach because a specific teacher asks us for help on a lesson and sometimes we teach for the enjoyment of teaching!

    Please continue to follow us on this journey and share what we are doing. We are always more than willing to answer questions or give more information. If you feel compelled to make a donation or support the school in some other capacity please either email us at kccschool15@gmail.com or visit Kingdom Cares International.

    Peace and Blessings,

    | Anna |

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