Identity and Household items

I will be teaching my next round of ESL classes next week.  Before I do that, you need to know about last month’s classes.

four of the five students and teacher Shadrack closest to the whiteboard

My intermediate students met the week before my beginning students.  We needed to hold the ESL class early so one student could attend class and then teach the next week for the TBTI class on Mark 9-16.  We held the class at the other house in my compound since there were just a few students.  The number of students varies in this class, but I usually only have between four and eight, so it is easier to cook at my house than to set everything up to cook at the school.  This week I had five students and my teaching assistant, Shadrack.

now all of them matching words with pictures

The students were learning about Identity.  We played the “who am I?” game to help them identify the various characters in the story of Peter’s early time with Jesus as a review of previous lessons.  The story for the week was about Jesus asking the disciples who people say that he is and the story of the transfiguration.  These are found in Mark 8:27 – 9:10 if you want to refresh your memory.  It was a fun class and the students were able to identify several people through the course of the week.  At the end of the week they wrote a simple reference letter (from a form) to recommend Peter as a pastor at a local church.

The next week, I taught my beginning students about the things found in a house.  They had a lot of new words to learn.  We covered things found outside the house (on it and around it) as well as the things in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room.  As you can imagine their houses don’t look like a typical American house.  So, we got creative in naming the parts of their houses.  Their rooms are found outside the hut but inside their fence.  We drew the hut with the various "rooms" around it and they labeled what they had in each room.  

I took them on a field trip to my house and to the Morden’s house so they could see some of the things that they don’t have in their own houses.  I had written a short rhyming booklet about the things found in a house square or round.  The students had to take the booklet and read it to someone in town and then ask them several questions.  I think they enjoyed the exercise.  They got to take the booklet home and will come back next week ready to read it again in class for review.

They also had to learn about some prepositions.  I used two boxes and a ball to explain the meaning of the prepositions in, on, under, next two, between and above.  We did several fun exercises using these words to make sure that they understood the meaning.  Part of their homework is to look at the pages of their books from this week and write some sentences telling where to find different objects using these prepositions.

"Write 1000 above the circle and your name in it."

Is that next to or between???

In the midst of learning about things in the kitchen, one of my students asked the names of some kitchen implements that are common here in Turkana.  Here are the pictures of these two items.

this is used to form corn meal once it has boiled dry

this is placed around the lip of a pot to take it off the fire

It looks like this when you have it around the pot

I gave them a guess as to what I would call them and then turned to my facebook friends to see what they might name them.  It made for some very interesting comments.  What about you?  What name would you give to these two utensils?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.