It is now the end of our second week as ‘Teacher Melissa’ and ‘Teacher Harriet’ and I feel we are settling into the school environment well. During our first two weeks of teaching we have had some great lessons, such as the children making their own role plays, a PE lesson based on ‘games’, a science lesson on ‘fats’ which involved a class experiment, and a mathematics lesson on ‘addition’ where the children completely surprised both of us with their knowledge. However, there have also been some less successful lessons which left us feeling a bit deflated, but it is these learning experiences that are helping us both to develop as teachers!
The school’s mission statement sets out its aims as being to “provide quality inclusive education aimed at producing healthy pupils who will serve the nation in all aspects of life”. This backs up the Zambian curriculum which incorporates most of the same subject areas that appear in the Northern Ireland Curriculum, and pushes them together into the main subjects of maths, literacy, English, science, Creative and Technology Studies (CTS), Social Development Studies (SDS), and cultural studies (CS). The main teaching language within the school is English, so all lessons apart from Zambian language and literacy, which combine both English and the local language Chitonga, are taught in English.
The children doing a reading activity where they have to read a storybook in groups and then retell the story using puppets.
Our lessons are English and maths every day, science four times a week and CTS twice a week. Throughout these past two weeks it has become very apparent to us that although English is taught from Grade 1, there are many children who still cannot read, greatly hindering their access to the curriculum. At the beginning I found myself becoming frustrated when children weren’t able to answer a science or maths questions which seemed like a simple task of reading the answer from the board. Now I keep reminding myself of how difficult it must be for these children who are not only having to learn all their subjects in a language which is not their first language, but also trying to understand our accent! This has reinforced to me just how important it is that children are able to read, because if they cannot read then all other areas of the curriculum become inaccessible to them. For example, there are many pupils who are weak in other subject areas but are strong in maths where they don’t have to read words to answer the questions. As a response to this we have started to put a greater emphasis on reading and we are constantly having the children participate in individual reading and shared reading of the information we put on the board so that we can be sure that all children are at least hearing what we are talking about.
A lovely recount written by Precious in Grade 6!
Another area which we have put emphasis on is spelling. After we got the children to do some writing for us it became apparent that even those who were very capable readers, didn’t have very good writing skills and were constantly asking us to spell even simple words such as ‘want’ or ‘who’. The challenge here is getting the children motivated so that they actually go home and learn the spellings. There isn’t much emphasis on homework here and there doesn’t seem to be consequences if homework isn’t done, so some children have become quite complacent about it.
I have now settled into the school routine and although the 6am starts are a bit horrible and the teaching can be very challenging, I wouldn’t want swap Zambezi Basic School for any other school right now!
We got a taste of luxury this week when we visited Livingstone Island and the five star hotel, the Royal Livingstone. We had an amazing day being waited on hand and foot on Livingstone Island and getting some great food after swimming at the top of the Falls, and then relaxing in the grounds of the hotel, but we both decided that we’d much rather have Jollyboys! Although it was lovely to experience that for a day, if you stayed there for too long you really would be missing out on the ‘true African experience’. Being within the hotel grounds you really could have been anywhere else in the world…it was just a fancy hotel! Being in Jollyboys and having new people from everywhere in the world passing through every day, being able to organise trips to see the true Zambia, and having the centre of Livingstone right on your doorstep is a much better experience in my opinion. Although in saying that, I’m sure we will be back at the Royal Livingstone for cocktails and high tea at some point in the next eight weeks! 
The other highlight of this week was Zambia winning the African Cup of Nations which was an amazing achievement for the country. Last Sunday night Livingstone was thriving as Zambia played in the final and we went to our favourite local bar ‘Limpo’s’ where we had been for all the other matches. We were right in the middle of the celebrating as Zambia won after a full ninety-four minutes, then thirty minutes extra time, and nine sets of penalties! We felt like real Zambians as we celebrated alongside the locals, and I felt very proud of my current home country! 
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