The second week in Kenya was a little bit short since we went on a safari on Monday and Tuesday was dedicated to go shopping for materials. Thanks to almost 50 people we were able to buy a lot of materials, outdoors equipment, and even throw a party for the kids.


So... THANK YOU very much to my family and friends (and Sita's and April's friends) to make this happen and be able to bring some materials that will be long lasting. It really means a lot that you guys believed in this project and were able to help me out, it really truly wouldn't have been possible without your help! 💜💜💜

I believe everything happens for a reason and the fact that our apartment was cancelled last minute and we stayed in westlands was a blessing! We were very close to the shopping center and the supermarket so pretty much everyday we stopped to get materials.

April speeding through the pedestrian traffic in Nairobi!

The donations took over the living room!!!!

Everything organized! Yeay!

April cutting the tags from the scissors we bought!

On tuesday we ventured to the CBD to do all the shopping. The CBD (Central Business District) is NOT like a business district in NYC, or SF, or LA; this CBD is craziness at its best! Matatus coming at you from all directions, busy sidewalks full of street vendors, and stores every two steps!


The main goal for CBD was to print and laminate many of the activities since they are a third of the price than westlands, buy some posters, and soccer balls!!!

The first shop we stopped at we got some elastic to show the kids how to play the game during recess.


From there we found an affordable printing shop but while we were printing power went off so we went out to look for soccer balls. My uncle, who is the ultimate soccer fan had donated some money so I put it aside to buy soccer balls for the kids. I find it to be tricky to buy soccer balls in Kenya because: 1. they are really expensive, and 2. they are all fake! (and they pretend that the hand painted Adidas or Mikasa is the real deal 😒)

It took a lot of bargaining but we finally managed to get some decent balls at an affordable price. We had to stop at a lot of stores and see what we could get, we finally bought some from Martin in a tiny shops along river road!


Once the power came back we continued the printing, laminating, and cutting! I was so happy to have a few extra helping hands!




On Wednesday we returned to the school and hit a little bump in the road. An hour before our departure, our driver decided that he was no longer going to take us for the price that he had told us and what we had paid him the previous week. He demanded more money, we requested an uber.

We finally made it to school and started the day with a book from one of my favorite authors: Mo Willems!!!!
With donations I was able to get 25 children books, among them "There is a bird on your head", one of the many books in the collection of Piggy and Gerald! These books are super funny and the illustrations are simply the best!

It looks like I'm very dramatic at reading books!!

After the book I had planned on introducing patterns followed by an activity.

I am trained to do all work one-on-one, taking time to teach a lesson to one child only but here it would be unrealistic to introduce a method that requires one-on-one attention when there are 25 children and only one teacher. What I like about my time in Kenya is that it challenges me to think outside the box and different methods of doing an activity with a high number of children and still make it interactive and fun for them.

The lesson began by me drawing some shapes in the black board and saying the pattern "red yellow- red yellow- red yellow" and paying attention to make a small pause in between the patterns so the kids could understand the pattern.


The next step of the lesson was going around the circle carrying pieces of the pattern block and having the whole circle say the pattern. We started the circle by giving one of the children a colored block and we said "red", then we gave the next child a red block and said "yellow" and from there the children would say "red yellow- red..." and we would ask the next child what colour was next and show him or her the two choices.
Overall I thought it was a nice activity and the kids really liked having an object to hold.



Following the circle we did some more patterns using the pattern blocks and some free printable I found at Confessions of a Homeschooler.



To be honest I was a little torn between given children the exact amount of blocks or giving them some blocks and have them recognise and figure out what is needed in order to complete the task.

At the end I decided that it was the best choice to give them the exact amount of material needed simply because I truly believe that children need to be successful at the tasks in order to  be motivated to keep going.  All the kids in the classroom are at so many different levels that I felt it would be unjust to just throw a lot of shapes and overwhelm them, give them anxiety, and not make this activity fun and successful.

In addition, I thought that it was best practice for teacher Laura to know the progression of an activity. You start by giving them the exact pieces so that they can successfully finish the task and then little by little you can make the activity a little bit more challenging. Another one of my thought for giving the exact amount is to keep a close eye on the materials and making sure that the kids are not pocketing them (because they do, and we have found a couple of pieces in kid's pockets.)
All these materials are new and exciting and last year we started teaching the children about the importance of keeping the materials clean, treating them nicely, and returning them. Interestingly the kids that put materials into their pockets were the new students who were not in the classroom last year so it was important to re introduce the idea and make sure we knew what was out on the tables.



I think a very important message to get through the teachers is that a prepared environment is EVERYTHING! As a teacher you have to make sure that the environment is prepared for the children to learn! You need to plan a lesson, you need to make time to separate the activities, to make sure that everything is complete, that all the cards in a set are present, that the exact number of items needed are there because if you give a child an activity that is incomplete you are not allowing that child to be successful on its own (ugh, that was a long sentence!) Being a teacher is to set up before an activity, to plan, and not to just show up and pull whatever you have out of a hat... It's actually hard work!

In order to prepare for this volunteer work I did research months in advance, I started to have things delivered starting in December in El Salvador using my own money (really hoping I would get donations to cover it), I spent hours on blogs finding free printables, checking amazon for materials that would be long lasting and appropriate for this age range. Preparation is KEY!



What was very different this time is that I had the girls helping out which was great but also it added a component to my work load. I now had to train not only the teachers but them as well. As a Montessori teacher we always laughed and said "Can you imagine if the kids saw how we clean up?" because when the children are present everything has to be done in order, gracefully, picking one item at the time and putting them slowly where it belongs. But when the children are not present at times you just dump all the beads in one bucket and not move them one by one.

Well, most of the time I forgot to tell the girls that we needed to put our best cleaning behaviour forward and that we just couldn't dump all the pattern blocks into the bucket but instead teach them to gracefully clean up.
I felt frustrated many times because I did not see that coming and I totally forgot to teach them the little details.  In teaching little kids order is KEY! And these classrooms are in total disorder! The way they run around, hit other kids with chairs, put chairs on top of their head, so I felt like teaching order was very important but then so difficult!
I am a strong believer that children copy everything they see so if they see us being sloppy and disrespectful with the material they will too.






Overall I felt like the activity was a success, kids had fun exploring shapes and using new materials.

After teacher Laura's class we headed over teacher Virginia where I stepped back and let the girls lead the whole lesson.




Lunch time was always crazy. For some reason the teachers leave the classroom before the lunch is actually served and the children just go berserk.  They fight, they push the door and lock themselves inside the classroom, and the best part? They don't listen, there wasn't anything I could do to stop the madness! My one tactic was to ask the wilder ones to go outside but not even that helped that much!


On that day after lunch we brought out some jump ropes and had a blast seeing the kids jump.
At the beginning it was all a crazy mess, everybody wanted a turn but one knew how to actually form a line and take turns. The circles kept on getting smaller despite us telling the kids to back off a little bit so the rope could go around without hitting any kids.


The little kids were just a little bit better at forming a line but still they all cut, pushed, and shoved others in order to get to the front.


I was very impressed by the jumping skills of some of these kids. The older ones jump in groups of three or more and then kids kept joining without tripping on the rope, pretty cool!


We also pulled out some soccer balls!

From recess we decided to go visit 2nd grade.
We introduced ourselves and then gave them a colouring activity. Since they are a little bigger we gave them colouring pages that they had to match the number with the colour in the legend.




Since we didn't have a driver we returned on a matatu:



Day five was all about the math link cubes.

We started the day as always with a book and some songs and then while in the circle I introduced the math link cubes to the children. They had never worked with them so it was very important to show them how they worked. First i went around in the circle and put to cubes close to their ears and snapped it together so they could hear the sound the cubes made when put together.
The next step was to figure out how they could snap and make the noise. I went around the circle and show them that the cube had a "snap" and a "no snap" side. When put together a snap and no snap it clicked, made a noise, and stuck together. When two snaps or two no snaps were put together then there wasn't a noise and they wouldn't stick.
The next step was for them to touch the "snap" and the "no snap" in order to create a muscle memory of it.

Feeling the snap part!

The activity I had planned for the day was to create some letters out of the math link cubes with the free printables from Life over C's. For this activity you could print colored prints or black and white; I decided to do black and white so we didn't have to worry about running out of a specific colour. In addition,  it gave the children freedom to chose whatever colours they wanted. Unlike the activity from the previous day, this time the children were not given the exact number of link cubes.









It was very important to monitor the classroom for those children who were "behind" and the more "advanced" (I hate labelling!) and made sure that they were given tasks they could accomplish.

For example, a kid made a lot of different letters during the same time another kid could do an "i". So, as a teacher one needs to always be aware of children's progress and plan accordingly.

Separating by colour!

After lunch we went back to second grade! This time we visited both of the classrooms and the girls read the book "Piggy nation: A day at work with dad." The books were a donation by the author, Richard Rosser, a friend of April's who sent her with 6 copies of two different books and even a cool card game! So thankful for all the donations!




The book was great, it taught the children about "piggy behaviour" (naughty or not very nice behaviour.) The comprehension in the 2nd grade class was really good and my favorite part of the book was that at the back it had some questions so after reading we engaged in a discussion about the book. We throughly enjoyed it!

Happy birthday to me!!!
Day six started by us walking a mile to school. Somehow the Chinese have gotten involved in road construction in Kenya and they think it's a good idea to just totally close a road instead of doing the left lane, and then the right lane so cars can still go through. Taking the backroads is TERRIBLE! One time it took a driver AN HOUR to go on the back road so I looked at the map and we all made the decision of walking to school.

We were quite a funny sight, the Chinese guy in charge even took a picture of us walking next to the turmac!

When I was asking for donations one of my mom's friends said to me that she wanted to donate a party with cake,  juice,  food, and everything fun the kids could want so I decided we would celebrate my birthday with the kiddos. Well, the day we had to walk to school we had two cakes, like 3 gallons of juice, huge bags of popcorn, and cookies but we made it!


As we entered the school we went to the office and hid all the goodies so the kids wouldn't go crazy and asked a thousand times when the party was going to be.

The morning started with the usual, a book and songs, and then we moved on to the activities for the day. Friday was all about fine motor skills so I had divided the classroom into 3 different activities (mainly because we don't have 25 of each activity so it had to be divided.)

One of the activities was using tweezers.
With donations I bought on amazon a set of learning resources tweezers, back home I bought colored wooden cubes, and had asked the teachers to use some of the egg cartons they had in storage.

I gave each child a set of tweezer, an egg carton, and 15 cubes. First, I showed them how to hold the tweezers and then introduced the sequence of "press" and "release." They had to grab one cube by pressing the tweezer together and place it in the egg carton by releasing some of the pressure and the cube dropping down.



Ideally this activity would be done from top to bottom and left to right. We try to incorporate the top to bottom-left to right in all the activities just in order to prepare them for reading and writing. At the same time I do not like to correct the children who are not doing it "properly" only because I don't want to discourage them from doing the activity. In my opinion there is nothing worst than an adult coming to you and letting you know it is not correct. Instead, I prefer to find a window where I can say something like "let's do it together" or "let's take turns" and even sometimes I said "let me show you again." In Montessori I would just make sure to give the child a presentation again later on but i stay away from saying "No, it's not that way" or "You are doing it wrong" just to make sure I'm not crushing that little person's feelings.

Lesson on how to hold the tweezer!

After finishing the first round some of the kids even got creative by separating the rows by colours and some even asked us to exchange some colours for other so that they would have even numbers! I love it when the kids come up with new things!

Love how organised them by colour and kept some empty because she didn't have the right colours. I made sure to give her the ones that would help her accomplish her task.

Another activity was lacing with the Learning Resources' alphabet lacing. This activity is really good for their little fingers and strengthening their fine motor skills, bilateral coordination, eye-hand coordination, and many others. In the future the lacing alphabet letters can help with spelling, letter recognition, letter sound, so I thought it would be a nice addition to the classroom.

Loving the concentration look and the pincer grasp!

A younger child, not yet using pincer grasp but she'll get there!

The third and last activity was using GeoBoards.
These are a lot of fun and my students actually loved to work with them so I thought it would be fun to bring to Africa. Children get to make patterns, shapes, and explore the different ways their little fingers can stretch the rubber bands. Also, it is a great introduction to geometry and shapes.





We then moved on to the classroom next door and introduced them to the song "five red apples" which was a total hit and the kids had so much fun shaking their apple tree.

Everybody had their apple tree way up high!

After lunch we started to get ready for a PARTY!!! Woohoo
While the kids were out playing we set up the classroom by blowing and hanging up balloons (we even got big kids to come help out!)


I even painted teacher Laura!


The party started by April and Sita blowing bubbles as the children entered the classroom!


And then the chaos began! Children went crazy with the balloons, their little faces were glowing, they all looked so happy my heart was smiling!

Those faces!!!!!!!!! They melt my heart!!!

If this doesn't melt your heart, I don't know what does!

To me it was very interesting to see that the kids did not touch the food as they entered the classroom, they all sat down and waited until they were told they could eat. I thought it would be hands trying to grab whatever they could but it wasn't!



I tried to do some face painting but failed miserably since it was way too much going on.


Cake Time!
The children all sang happy birthday as April and Sita stood next to me with cakes ready for me to blow the candles!!! 💜

Balloons make kids go crazy!!! haha

They all had so much to eat and they kept asking for me... so we gave them more! haha Probably they were on a sugar high for a long time!



The party got a little crazy so we took it outside where the balloons popped within 20 and 30 seconds! haha