The KKV School

So I am sure everyone is just dying to know what the school is like. At KKV they use quite a different setup. The children do most of their learning on their own through PACEs, which are basically workbooks. All of the PACEs are reused. Everything is done in pencil so that at the end of the workbook the answers can be erased and the booklet can be used again by the next student. It is done this way because workbooks are extremely expensive and supplying them for all of the kids in each subject would be impossible. So everyday time is taken to "rub" (erase) PACEs. The students sit at their own little cubical, completing a few sections out of the booklet before they check their work with the score key. The whole system is very strict and is based on teaching the children discipline, integrity, patience, ect...basically characteristics of Christ. So after they have completed their work, they put up a tag on their desk and wait to be called to go check their work. From there they raise their hand and patiently wait for a teacher to come over and double check their work. If there are any mistakes the student returns to their desk and makes corrections and then repeats until 100% of the section is correct. If they miss 3 or more questions then they usually have to erase all of their work and get the section explained to them before they can retry. The entire room is silent all day long, which is way different from an American classroom. Everything is biblical based from the morning pledges to the bible passages that they have to memorize to the workbooks completely revolving around scripture! It is actually quite impressive in that aspect. These children memorize huge chunks of scripture and get demerits if they can not recite it. Their current scripture is over 25 verses long! And pretty soon they will be starting a new one! It is really amazing! Every Thursday, chapel is held at the Banda and usually lasts about an hour. The teacher I am helping, Catherine, is such an amazing woman! She is constantly telling the students about the love of Jesus and the importance of having His Word in our hearts. Last week, she talked for almost a half an hour after lunch about salvation and around 8 kids accepted Jesus as their Savior! I love the fact that prayer and scripture can be shared all day long! It is really an awesome setup. However, I do wish that there would be more interaction/ more hands on learning. All of the children in my class are from other orphanages, so I only get to see them during the school day. I know all of them now by face and name and am starting to get to know a few of them a lot better during breaks. Today I got to take a few students outside and work with them on adjectives. It was really fun getting to come up with different ways to explain things; by far my favorite part! With two teachers in the classroom now, they are making tremendous progress! This is great because many of them are really far behind in school, especially in English. On Fridays, school gets out at 1 instead of 4 so that the students can play sports. Football (soccer) is HUGE here and the kids are really talented! This Friday the boys get to go swimming and I think we are going to play volleyball with some of the girls who don't really like football. Next Friday, however, the girls get to go swimming! That will be fun! Last Friday, we took the young kids swimming and it was complete chaos! Most of them didn't know how to swim and since only Libby and I were teaching it was impossible but full of laughs. It didn't take long to realize that even the older children didn't care so much if they could swim or not as long as you were giving them attention and encouragement! Like all children, they just want attention and love; to feel like they are the whole world to somebody! It has helped me become more aware of the importance of encouraging and expressing our love to children and one another; no matter how loud, crazy, and inconvenient that it might seem to be at the time. Not only is it much needed but it's deserved!