Feed A Hungry Mind

The national Standard VII, end of primary school, examinations take place on 9^th and 10^th September. That is then followed by a week’s half-term holiday.

Our work started again in the schools in the third week of July, following the long mid-year break in June and part of July.

However, at the beginning of July Katy Allen, the director, attended the LANES international conference held at the University of Dar es Salaam. The conference was on promoting innovative approaches to the teaching and learning of literacy and numeracy in the primary schools. Katy presented a paper on the ‘Jiandae’ language awareness course books which this project prepared and printed and which is being used on our pilot projects. This highlighted the emphasis in the course on Swahili reading and writing and the importance of ‘chunking’ or learning letter-clusters, from which each Swahili word is formed. It also emphasised the importance of the development of different kinds of thinking skills, as this is something that is not brought out from the current syllabuses.

Barbara Kerr worked hard to produce data analysis of the Regional Mock examinations for Standard VII which took place in May before the schools closed. Each examination is a multiple-choice paper. Each school on the project was provided with data which show the weak areas which need to be addressed before the national examinations. Katy Allen wrote a paper on the English mock examination as it was full of grammatical errors and sentences which had little meaning; for some questions there was no correct answer and for others three of the four options would have given grammatically correct answers. The paper will be given to the Academic Officers in the district.

In the schools Barbara Kerr has continued to assist teachers with the teaching of mathematics, but concentrating on Standard VII teaching before the pupils sit the national examination.

One session exposed the teachers’ lack of understanding of ‘perimeter’. This is because they use a formula without understanding the basic concept.

‘Mobile tea’ sessions have been held for teachers of English. This is a workshop session when we collect the teachers from their schools and bring them to Langasani primary school, set out our thermoses of tea and milk and our plate full of ‘maandazi’ (doughnuts), and work with refreshments. Each session takes a grammar structure for the teachers to learn and practise. The teachers are now confident in the use of the past simple tense. Work continued on the past continuous tense with success, and teachers can confidently make their own sentences. More work was on ‘why?’ and ‘because’ and this was quickly picked up as it is so similar to the use of Swahili. In these sessions Katy is able to help the teachers by speaking Swahili and showing them the similar structures of Swahili and English.

Katy and Barbara have been invited by the Tanzania Institute of Education to attend their curriculum development sessions in August. This will be for two weeks to assist on the mathematics and English curriculum and is a great honour. Also in August Barbara has been invited to give a full-day session as part of the Mathematics Association of Tanzania (MAT)’s annual conference.

Thank you to all our donors for helping us to undertake this work, and so give such valuable assistance to the primary school teachers and their pupils.

Very best wishes

Katy

Katy Allen
Director

28^th August 2015