Teaching Aids

One of the challenges I face in the lectures is trying to change the students attitudes towards teaching the students by telling them (chalk and talk) and moving their ideas to doing things with the children (if you tell a child they will forget, if you show them they will remember, if you involve them they will understand – a great saying I am always reminding the students of). To do this the teachers need to make some teaching aids (they use a lot of rhymes and singing in the Gambia for teaching too which is good).

The difficulty I have found is making cheap or free teaching aids. I have taken a photo of what I started with – rice bags and cement bags (you can buy these for less than 5 dalasi at the market – so this resource is accessible), cartons from the bitiko (local shop) and material scraps from the tailor (both free). These I have turned into – flash cards (by covering cardboard in material – a cheap alternative to laminate), an alphabet chart (hemmed rice bag squares – the benefit is you can pin these into a book, or hang them on the wall), and a dolls house.

The doll’s house is part of the Government’s new early childhood curriculum so I thought I’d better find a way of showing the student’s how to make one. The design I came up with can be pulled apart for storage and put together for use. The best bit is that the individual pieces can also be used as flash cards to teach – matching patterns (which two materials are the same), colours (which bits of material are red, which are blue etc) and shape (find the circles, triangles etc).

The initial purpose of the doll’s house was to use it to teach position and direction (which is the subject I am teaching), however it took so much effort to make I wanted to make it have more than one use so the students could make it a daily part of their class. I have had mixed reactions from each class to the project – some students are worried about the glue (however the idea is that they bring their cardboard and material to class and I provide the scissors and glue), but in general the students are enthusiastic. The first class didn’t get organized and bring the materials – the other two were so busy making the doll’s house they didn’t want to stop (so we are spending two lectures on it now).

My other subject is Language teaching and learning aids. My first project for the students was to make a picture story book in their students’ home language, as it makes sense to first teach the students in their native language then move on to English. This is also what the research on Early Childhood Development has found. It makes sense.

Some of the students were troubled though, which troubles me also, that the missions who have established their schools have made a rule that the only language to be used at the school is English. Many of the discussions I have had with the ECD professionals is that it is worrying that children are losing a sense of their culture because it is not taught in the schools. People are so busy pursuing learning (which is completely understandable due to their aim to be in the global market) that at times the traditional languages and stories are being lost.

My first lecture showing the students the story in Mandinka was magical. They really loved the story, the students read each page to me and I demonstrate the reading skills that could be taught to young children even though the book was in Mandinka; things such as questioning about the characters, predicting what would happen in the story, reading left to right, word to word matching and phonics (Mandinka is a very phonetical language) could all be taught. The thing that I realized as I did the lesson was how much easier it must be to predict from a traditional story, rather than an English story, because it is based on the students own experiences. Once I demonstrated using the book to the students they were so excited about making one for their classroom.

The biggest difficulty for the students remains that many of their classes have four native languages, Mandinka, Wolof, Fula and many other tribal languages, so one language may not suit their whole class. Some of my students aren’t Gambian and were worried they wouldn’t be able to produce a book without knowing the language (until I pointed out that I had written a story in Mandinka, could read and understand it, even though I didn’t speak Mandinka). It really highlights the challenges they face though.

Anyway if you have got this far in reading my blog and are keen to find out something you could do from Australia – I would really love it if anyone wanted to send over some resources that the students could have to make teaching aids. Things like scissors, glue, coloured textas (thick and thin), pencils, erasers. They are generally hard to find here. If you are interested email me – my gmail is the same as this blog address.