A Usual Day

I realized that I have talked a lot about my school and experiences here, but still have not talked about what a normal day might look like in my classroom at Mile Gully Primary, so here we go!

Here is the view in the morning from the door of the main office:

Beautiful, isn't it?
From 8:00 to 8:15, all students participate in morning devotion. On Mondays and Fridays, the whole school lines up in the courtyard to have devotion with the principal, Mrs. Brackett.

Some students show up late, so this is not everyone in the school, but it is many of them. Here is a video of part of morning devotion, and I hope to upload more videos when I get the chance.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the students have devotion in their own classroom led by students, and on Wednesdays the students go to the houses they belong to - either red, yellow, or green. The houses are a mixture of the grades, and the devotion is usually led by a head girl or head boy from sixth grade. The head girl and head boy also walk around during school-wide devotion to make sure younger students  are standing how they should and paying attention.

Last weekend and at the beginning of last week, the Associate Dean from the College of Education at UW-Whitewater came to see the area and the program with her son. They visited Mile Gully Primary last Friday for some time to see what the devotion is like and myself and my teacher friends teach a little in our classrooms. They were introduced and welcomed during Friday's morning devotion.

From left to right: Mrs. Brackett-the principal, Mrs. Smith-our advisor, Dr. Agnew-the Dean, and Sandon-the Dean's son.

After devotion, the students return and say their Morning Prayer:

"Father, we thank Thee for the night, and for the pleasant morning light

for rest and food and loving care, & all that makes the world so fair.

Help us to do the things we should, to be to others kind & good,

in all we do, in all we say, to grow more loving every day. Amen."

and then welcome everyone with, "Good morning dear teachers and classmates."

Here are some pictures of my classroom and students:

Above: Entire classroom

Below: Each desk group, with six students at each 

At the start of the day, my class has Maths (what they call mathematics, or math). My teacher does this because they can have a hard time learning math and they are the most fresh and ready to learn in the morning. While I have been here, the students learned about adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions, and then I taught them a unit on Algebra. Unfortunately, I think some of it went way over their heads, since it is a pretty difficult subject to try and fathom when you are 10 years old, but they did well. Maybe I'm already dating myself, but we were offered Pre-Algebra in 8th grade, and that was the advanced math for our grade. I still have a hard time believing they are learning about it in 5th grade.

After Maths, the students do Social Studies/Integrated Studies or Science - these subjects alternate days from Monday through Thursday. Here is a picture from the students' Science book that I found interesting because of what the two characters in the picture are saying:

These two subjects lead up to break (like recess) at 10:15 when a teacher rings a hand bell to signal to the whole school that break has begun. The students can buy and eat snacks and play until break ends at 10:30. They wash up and get a drink at a faucet that uses rainwater which drains from the roof into a large tank:

Depending on how long Maths takes, Social Studies or Science may have to come after the break. In my classroom, this can also depend on how loud the classrooms next to us are being. The roof is tin, the floor is cement, and the room dividers are metal. I'm not sure if you can quite imagine how loud it gets with three rooms of two Grade 5 classes and one Grade 6 class, especially with all of the echoing. Sometimes, it can get so loud that my teacher has to stop her lesson or have the students work out of their workbook because she can't teach over the noise. It can get very frustrating and stressful. It definitely took some getting used to, especially for my throat with all of the yelling I have to do to make myself heard. It can also give you quite the headache.


Lunch starts at 12:00. Before the students leave for lunch, they say their Give Thanks prayer:

"For what we are about to receive, we give Thee thanks, oh Lord. Amen."

The lunch has been cooking all morning. While we were teaching P.E. on Friday, we saw Friday's lunch being prepared:

This fire was started by the kitchen, but that is outside right on the edge of the courtyard area that we were teaching P.E. in. It was a little nerve-wracking to have 30 kids in an area with a fire, but they stayed well away from it. Quite the set-up to cook lunch.

Once the students have eaten, they get the rest of the hour-long lunch break to play. They have been using the jump ropes that we brought them, and those that don't use them usually kick around a plastic bottle to play football (soccer) with.

Once lunch ends at 1:00, the students head back to their classrooms to Return Thanks:

"Thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the world so sweet.

Thank you for the birds that sing, thank you Lord for everything. Amen."

After lunch, we work on Language Arts or Reading. Lately, my students have been learning about the weather and different ways to express the weather. They have also been doing lots of work with reading passages and answering comprehension questions (which my kiddos at home know an awful lot about, and they are pros now!). When the students are finished with their work, they bring their books up to be marked with a "sticky":

A "sticky" is a check-mark, and these are put on answers that are correct. Sometimes the students work very slowly, so this may take the whole rest of the afternoon until school ends at 2:30. Fridays are a little different, because the only subjects my teacher does every day are Math and Language Arts, so she includes P.E. and Visual Arts on Fridays. She seems pretty flexible with her schedule, and she says she has to be to work around all of the noise as well as how the students are doing with their work, and if they are understanding the concepts.

At the end of the day, the students pack up and say their closing prayer:

"School is over for today. We have done our work & done our play.

Before we go, we come to say, Heavenly Father we thank you for today. Amen."

The teacher says to have a good day, and the students all respond with, "Thank you, and the same to you."

Since the weather is very steady here, unlike Wisconsin, this is a picture of what many afternoons at the end of the school day look like here - cloudy, looking like rain, and some sun:

We walk down a very steep hill to the road, and then walk to the High School to meet a teacher there for our ride back to our hotel in Mandeville. We always see some friends along the way:

This school has taken a lot of getting used to. All of the noise was a problem for me, and since there isn't really much positive reinforcement going on, the students do not work very hard and talk all the more. The only negative consequence is, unfortunately, hitting. It is usually on the back, with a hand, or sometimes a ruler or notebook. I have not personally witnessed much of this at all, but I have heard it and heard about it. It is so hard to see that schools here are at the same point with discipline that we were about 50 years ago. This kind of punishment was still being used in the United States when my father was in school. 

Fortunately, I was able to observe a couple really good teachers and classes, but that is a story for another post! :) Thanks for keeping up with my blog, and feel free to ask me any questions you have and I can answer them. If you have the question, I'm sure there are others that do, too. My students' questions answered some questions that my friends and family were already wondering. :) Great job, Cambridge!