Welcome to Redeemer School!

The first days at Redeemer School were days to remember! Being the planners we are, Carrie and I had our lessons planned out, as well as our whole day planned with quick assessments to see what levels students were at, math class, science class, reading, and English. We were thinking that our anxiety was good anxiety, and were just excited to get class started!

Well, being teachers, we also knew that we would need to be flexible, and we found out quickly just how flexible we would have to be! Students came into school early, which was great! It was exciting to see how enthusiastic students were to be starting school and learning new things! Carrie was put in charge of taking names and creating a registration book, here was our first experience with great flexibility! Carrie and I had trouble understanding/deciphering their names, and even had trouble when Sr. Estella told us the names of the children! We quickly put the registration away, to be continued another day and moved on to asking their ages so we could separate out the 60+ students we had for 4 classrooms. 

Based on age, the great majority of students were in kindergarten. Flexibility Part 2! I was quickly pulled down to help with kindergarten, after our morning in grade 2-3 doing our assessments etc (which went rather well by-the-way). In the kindergarten room, things were quickly becoming, well let's just say the other teachers were becoming frazzled! Students were running around, students were crying, students were sleeping (this was partially because we were trying to get them to calm down, so we had them laying their heads on the desks).  Needless to say, we left defeated that day and really had some restructuring to do!

Commence Day 2-3! 
We made our changes, and started over again. Days 2-3 were so much better! We did our assessments again, worked 1-on-1 with a few of the students, and made it through break time, and after break time. We had more adjusting to do, but we were on our way to better days at Redeemer School. 

Normal day in Grade 2: school started at 8:00am, we had religion, reading/writing, maths (yes, they called it maths), science, and when we had our Zambian translator, we also had a class called SDS. After the half of the morning had passed (so at 10am) we had break for a half hour. Students would be able to use the restroom, have their food and drinks sitting out on the steps of the school and have their snack and then go and play for the remainder of the break. 

Redeemer School 

"Little Blue School"