Rangi

One of the things I've noticed about the children here, is that while most of them are quite intelligent, and all are both studious and hard working, they are not very good at thinking for themselves. The culture in Tanzania is very different to the type of environment that I grew up in. Children are taught to be absolutely respectful of their elders and are regularly beaten at school and home. I think this makes them very good at imitating: they learn to copy and to repeat things, but are too afraid to be creative and make mistakes. The consequence of this is that a lot of the chidren in the upper classes don't really know how to read, draw or write. They can copy something perfectly but don't know what it actually means.

The past week or so that I have had my set morning class, I've tried very hard to incorporate creativity into the lessons. This morning, I tried to have the kids make playdoh animals. I told them the name of the animal in English and had them all make their own one in different colour. Fish were quite easy, as were birds. After trying rabbits and cats for about half an hour we were all laughing too hard to keep going! My next ingenious (!) idea was to have everyone paint a picture with watercolours. I'm sure you can guess that after painting two pictures, a giraffe (triga) and an elephant (tembo), there was more paint on me, the children and the seats than on the pictures. They all had a good time though, and I'm sure with more practice they will get better. Last week I had them colour (rangi) things like 'a is for apple' all week: at the beginning all they did was scribble but by friday they were colouring in properly.