Although Mike and I have been in Zambia since June, I only
started working officially with Beyond Ourselves in September. Having recently
taken early retirement from being a headteacher in London, I was pleased to be
asked to focus this term on developing the Pre School Education at Kawama. From the visits I had made to the school
earlier in the year, it was obvious how far the school and the teachers had
come in their journey with the help of Beyond Ourselves. The youngest children
are in school from 7 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon, which might seem
like a long day to those of us used to education in England, but it means that
the children are safe and being looked after, allowing their parents to go out
to work or siblings to attend school. The classes are small for Zambia, with 29
children in the Nursery and 20 in Reception. Each class has it’s own teacher but no other
adult support. The children are taught in the Church hall, which has the
advantage of having lots of space, but also means that everything has to be packed
up then cleared away to the staff room at the end of the day, only to be
collected and brought out again the next morning. There are very few resources
for the teachers or children to use as learning aids compared to what we are
used to in the UK.
Teacher Annie
Teacher Florence
The two teachers have been incredibly welcoming to me and
open to trying out new ideas. Having observed the classes for a few days, I
talked to them both about the concept of ‘Learning through Play’, which is not
common in most schools in Zambia. The first major change we made was to set
aside the afternoons for group work and play sessions. Luckily Beyond Ourselves
had some resources like Lego and stickle bricks for construction as well as
plastic play food and child sized pots and pans, which along with searching out
resources at the local supermarkets for plastic cups and plates meant the
children could play at being ‘mums and dads’.
At first, the children were unsure how to play with the
resources, particularly some of the building blocks we had introduced. Once we
had shown them what fun it was to build a tower and then knock it down, they
caught on incredibly quickly and were soon competitive in building towers higher
and higher then laughing when they fell over.
It is amazing to see how good even the youngest children are at
using small blocks to build quite intricate structures, in lots of ways better
than many children in Nursery classes in the UK.
Most children quickly used the play food and pots and pans
to pretend to cook and feed each other, and used the local colourful material
called ‘chitenje’ to tie their new found dolls and cuddly toys as pretend
babies to their backs exactly like they see their mothers and older siblings
doing. After a few days, as they became
more confident and used to the resources, it was heart-warming to see how they
were using their imagination and starting to play together. I had noticed to
begin with that many of the boys would just hold on to pieces of lego or wooden
bricks rather than playing with them. This appeared to be to stop other children
snatching them from them.
However, after a few weeks, to my utter delight, I walked in
one day to find a group had eventually agreed to share all the pieces of
stickle bricks in order to make a large shared car, which they then enjoyed
playing with. That moment in itself made me realise how change can have such a
positive impact.
Once the children were able to play independently, I was
able to support the teachers in working with a small group rather than the
whole class, which was quite a new idea for them. The teachers were already
using some excellent teaching strategies such as singing songs at the beginning
of the lesson but I had noticed that the children spent a lot of time tracing
and copying numbers and letters, which the teachers had written in their
books. Obviously this takes a very long
time for the teacher to prepare, but not long for the children to complete. We cut
up a sheet of thin plywood into A4 sized pieces, sanded them down and painted
them with blackboard paint to make some
simple individual ‘mini blackboards’ so that each child could practice writing
letters and numbers, rubbing out mistakes easily and getting lots more
practice. This has worked amazingly well
well as it means the children are getting lots of practice without using lots
of exercise books, which of course cost the families money. The rest of the
classes have now seen these and they all want them. I am a great believer in
using resources which are sustainable and can be bought locally as our aim is
to help our partner schools to become more independent.
I have learned so much from the teachers and children at
Kawama which has been a great introduction to working with Beyond Ourselves and
living in Zambia.
By Jan Atkins
