English lessons at Fountain of Hope

Tuesday 31st August 2010 English lessons at Fountain of Hope

This morning David Jones, with the assistance of Scarlett Brannigan, taught his third English lesson to his new class at Fountain of Hope. Alongside sports the community school aims to teach English to the street children aged between eight and twenty two years of age.

David and his placement partner Chris Savage began the programme by reciting the alphabet, explaining vowels and including games such as eye-spy which engaged the class and gave use to the information they had just learned.

The class today allowed David to recap on the previous days work and expand to the use of adjectives. This was achieved by using English newspapers and asking the children to highlight first the vowels and then the adjectives. They were then encouraged to say a statement about themselves describing an attribute to them with an adjective.

The challenges included a lack of stationary such as paper and pens to write with. The boys attending today were also a range of ages and abilities so some would progress much quicker than others, however, it was excellent to see that the boys helped and encouraged each other to conclude the objective.

Jackson is a peer leader at the Fountain of Hope, which is run through Sport in Action, one of Zambia’s leading Sport Non-Government Organisations. He explained that the children really enjoy the English lessons as “it allows them to take the papers with them and they will use that to practice their studies”. He also described how the lessons aid the peer leaders themselves; “we may attend school but this is revision for us too”.

The IDEALS students will continue to assist in various schools throughout their project teaching sports, English life skills and other activities.