The Hope!

Hello!

My English class last week was all about "The Hope" movie.  I found this program online.  It uses a movie to teach english.  It tells the story of the Bible and has three narrators with different english accents telling the story.  It has a lot of "big" words in it, so I wasn't sure how my students would do.  There are 15 lessons that correspond with 15 parts of the movie.  So, I decided to try it and see how they would do.

They loved it!  We did the introduction and the first part of the first chapter.  The words are hard to understand, but there are several computer games and helps to help the student begin to understand the meanings of the words.  I did have a Turkana help me translate it too, so that helped a lot.  Try explaining the meaning of words like complexity, mystery, depth of human joy and pain, recorded, preserved, eternal proportions, amazingly and extraordinary in english let alone another language.  Those were a few of the words in the introduction.  They are concept words that are a bit hard to explain, but the students began to understand the ideas as we worked through the various parts of the lesson.  I was very happy with their progress.  After working through the lesson, they were happy to be able to understand the introduction during their second viewing.

When I showed them Chapter one, they got really excited.  It is about creation.  They were excited to see all the different insects and animals - especially the african ones.  Most of them have never seen these animals in person, so it was fun for them to see them and even hear some of the noises they make.  This movie has a fairly decent job of visualizing God making the earth out of nothing.  It also does well with him making Adam out of dust.  It even showed it taking place in an area with lots of sand - so they could relate to that.  :)  We will do the bulk of the lesson activities in our November class.  I am hoping we can finish chapter 1 and 2 for that class.  It will be Nov 8-13.

I am glad to have found this resource.  I am getting to the end of our current textbook and was wondering what to use next.  So, this will last for a few months as we work through the whole movie.  I am including some work with grammar for these lessons too, as they need help in using the correct forms when they speak.  I am really excited that this gives them a lot of opportunities to discuss things in class. They already know the Bible pretty well, so it is something they can talk about and really get into it.  It is also something they will need to be able to talk about and read about in the future too, as they use English Bible teaching aids.  So, I am happy with the progress made this past week and am looking forward to using this for the next few months of class.

This program comes with computer activities as part of the lesson.  I have access to two computers that I can use while teaching.  I had an educated Turkana man come and help me for a couple of days and was able to divide the students into two groups so they could do some individual (with others looking on) work.  When that man had to leave or when we were all one group, I used a projector connected to a computer to display the image on a wall and a large speaker for the sound.  It worked pretty well since the class is only 12 students right now.  As long as we have power, it will be a good class :).  I am praying that we continue to have power for the weeks of my class!  Thanks to my friends and fellow missionaries here in Lodwar (Keshule, Ali, Theo and Kaby) for helping me to get these things working correctly.  I tried to connect my TV to my computer but we couldn't get it to work in color.  It has something to do with my computer being NTSC and my TV being multi-system.  We couldn't get it to work, so I had to switch to the projector and speakers which was a bit more complicated but worked well.

How about you?  Have you tried any fun new things at work or home lately?  I would love to hear about them.  Thanks for reading my blog and for your prayers!