Galilea, Galilea

Monday meant a new school for Tutu and I, and we had opted to visit Galilea, the only Omega in the area that we had not yet made it to.  Ken and Nevis collected us from the hotel, Nevis, as usual hid from the scary obruni girls, and then fell asleep, despite the bumpy road.  First impressions of the school were that it was well-organised and orderly, it was nicely painted, and well laid out.  The school manager, Mary showed us round and introduced us to all of the classes, although when we entered nursery Nevis began to cry (I think he is sick of the scary obruni's following him around).  We watched an ICT lesson to get us into the swing of things, and it was very like Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall, as the children worked in small groups teaching each other and learning how to do things through discovery as opposed to direct instruction.

After this we went into some of the younger classes, whose teachers had been at the phonics training, and had began to teach it.  We did some short phonics lessons with KG2 and N2, KG2 began to get some words and were quite good at the sounds.  We even did some activities with human words, and naughts and crosses which went down well.  N2 however had been taught alphabetically as opposed to the specific phonics order, and struggled to grasp the sounds and actions, perhaps they are a little young.  We attempted to add 's' to their repertoire however and then moved on.

Following this we taught English to P5 as half of the class was in ICT and the other half had been left to fend for themselves.  Part way through we were joined by the rest of the class and we managed to work through some of the activities in their English books quite successfully. The class were keen for us to stay on but we left them to their maths test, which looked rather difficult, mainly due to the different terms used in Ghana.  Looking at the test paper I thought that they were working at quite a high level, and this illustrates the high standards demanded by the schools.

Earlier in the day we had mentioned that we liked Jollof rice to the school manager and were served this, with Goat meat and a boiled egg, after a rather lengthy wait, taking us up the end of the school day.  I am enjoying the boiled egg and rice combination however and feel that I may bring this back to the UK.  Whilst eating however we were disturbed by scenes of the P2 teacher opposite rather brutally caning most of her class (I am doubting they had done anything bad enough to deserve that), and I wondered what the policy was on this in the Omega schools.

The same teacher was later asked to escort us to a taxi, and this was fortunate as we would not have found our way back out alone!