One Hen in the classroom Week 1 Day 1

Day 1
Overall, I thought the lesson went great. The scholars seemed to be engaged with the story and the other activities. They especially seemed to enjoy learning that in Ghana children are named according to the day of the week they are born on and learning what their names would be if they had been born in Ghana :-).

When the scholars first entered, I had South African music playing instead of the music from the website (which is what I would have preferred.) However, there was no Internet access. Considering that the scholars did enjoy the music, it might be helpful to have the One Hen website music on a separate CD, so that the Internet connection won’t be an issue. I tied in the African music with the fact that we are learning about a country in Africa. I also discussed with the students why they thought it was important to learn about Africa in general, asking questions such as; why do you think we want to know about people all the way across the world? Why would this be helpful to us here in America?. I thought that this was also something to emphasize from the beginning with the scholars.

I was not able to complete all of the interactive read-aloud today because it was important for me to take 10 minutes at the beginning to explain the classroom expectations and other administrative things) at the beginning. This might be something to think about for future sessions. (We made it to page 7 in both classes).
I opted not to do the drumming (when scholars identified a problem and solution) during the read-aloud because I was convinced it could be a distraction. What I did do, however, was create a “One Hen Key Words” list with words that seemed a little difficult to understand. When we came across a word that students didn’t understand during the story, I added the word to the list and we discussed it a little bit (thinking about how it was used in the sentence, etc.) until we came up with the definition. I thought that such a list would be especially helpful considering that this is a similar technique used by the BELL literacy teachers.

Also, for the read-aloud part of the activity, I distributed one-hen books to partner groups so that they could read along with me. I thought that this was very effective because it kept the students engaged while I read, and they were also able to physically identify the words as we read them.
Finally, I did not get to do the “crazy memorization” or the fufu dance and song. However, I do plan to begin tomorrow’s lesson with the dance and song as an interactive starter.