Category: * Peace Corps

A continuation from Project Updates by Michelle

Secondary Projects: Other things I’ve worked on outside of literacy pull-out groups, include:

• Website and online marketing for family-friendly event by our host mom
• Created marketing materials and signs for local organizations and businesses
• Supported strategic planning meeting at The Source community center
• Assisted in editing The Source rental agreement, volunteer training outline, and operations manual
• Face painting at the school fair
• Tech assistance for parent workshops at the school

In the works: I’m helping the school apply for a small grant to support a “Productive Classroom Environment Project” which includes
Continue reading “Project Update: Part Two” →

A part of Peace Corps accountability is our trimester reports, which summarize what we’ve been up to every four months. As I (Michelle) am working on my upcoming report, I thought it might be helpful to share a bit of it with you.

Primary Project: Pull-out groups

In the first school term, I worked with 36 students in small groups of 2 to 5, for about 40 minutes each, once or twice a week.

Six girls and twelve boys from grades 2, 3, and 4 were still reviewing some of the letters and learning the sounds the letters make. Two girls and eight boys were still reading below the grade one level and we worked on letter sounds, how to sound out new words, and recognizing basic sight words. The few remaining students are either reading only two grades below or are in grade four and still don’t know half their letters. Since January, I’ve also started a few groups of 1^st graders.

I try to make my sessions fun, incorporating games like Bingo and songs. I didn’t want to bring in my own electronics at first, but seeing how the kids responded to alphabet and other educational videos and being that there are no working computers to use at the school, I took the risk to bring something to watch ‘shows’ on twice a week. I think it’s been really effective on a number of levels.

The time slots when I can pull students out of their usual classes are limited, so I started taking the more “advanced” ones for individual reading time during their morning break and lunch hour. Surprisingly, most of them come willingly, unless they haven’t eaten yet, in which case I just find another student to read with.

Challenges: My greatest challenge at work is the level of disorder that goes on outside my little reading room because it means frequent distractions in my class. I’m already trying to minimize energy spent managing behavior of the kids I’m working with, but some days I spend even more energy keeping other unsupervised students from interrupting my sessions. Occasionally, it has gotten exasperating, like the day some kid threw gravel through the slat windows while I was with a group of first graders. But for every chaotic day there is usually a mediocre or productive one.

Rewards: In just one trimester, I can already see improvement in some (though not all) of the students. A few have gotten into the habit of sounding out unknown words when they read, instead of just guessing or giving up like they used to. And the chart I made to track how many books each student has successfully completed in individual reading sessions has led to a competition among some of the third grade boys to read more than their friends. Finally, one of my favorite little accomplishments has been with one of my neighbors who is in first grade at the school. He and his sister sometimes join me on the walk to school; and since he is a recent addition to my reading sessions, I learned that he did not know how to spell his own name. I got the spelling of his name from his sister and encouraged her to help me coach him whenever she could. Every time I saw him in the schoolyard, I would spell his name in a little chant and make him repeat it. Then one day as we were walking home, I heard him tell his sister two separate times, “I can spell my name!” followed by his name chant. It was so cute!

More next time… -M

We are currently in Kingston at an All-Volunteer Conference open to the sixty or so volunteers currently on the island. I’d say almost forty of us showed up since some are off island with their families, others chose not to come, and the less fortunate caught dengue fever. It’s the first time I’ve been back to the “big city” since we swore in six months ago. I have to say that the change of pace and scenery is a welcome thing to have every once in a while.

In an effort to keep the two day conference on a minimal budget, some US Embassy and USAID officers opened their homes to several of us volunteers on Thursday night. Jedd and I got to stay the night and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with an incredibly well-travelled, career Embassy officer, his wife, and two teenage children. Every dish was delicious and brought back the tastes of home. The company, including their guests (mostly Barbadians with some connection to the US State offices who have relocated to Jamaica), were fun, friendly, and engaging. It was fascinating to interact with a family who has lived in a different country every two to three years.

The All Volunteer conference we’re attending has served as a nice reunion and a chance for volunteers to share their experience and expertise with each other. Jedd helped facilitate a session on teaching basic computer classes, mine is on team building activities. This afternoon we’ll head back home, four hours across the island, on another crowded bus and then its back to every-day life.

Hurricane Sandy passed us without too much excitement. As you can see in the image below, the storm did not actually cover the entire island as originally predicted but instead passed over the East side. Those of us on the West saw wind gusts for several hours, a relatively small amount of rain, and a good number of power surges and outages.
In a hasty effort to depict what our experience was like, I threw together a couple video clips from our day.

What you don’t see is a lot of time spent staring out the window, reading, watching a movie, and hanging out on our host parents’ balcony while chatting and overlooking the yard in the evening. Their yard suffered minimal damage. One large tree branch snapped off a tree that was already dying, another oversized flower bush and a few stray palm branches were bent to the ground. That was really it. So we feel fortunate and it sounds like our friends on the other side of the island, who faced the brunt of the storm, fared safely as well. Today, the day after the storm, the schools are still closed but the community center eventually opened up and things in town are getting back to normal.