At the Crack of Dawn

It's 7:00 am and we're in a SELI Young Writers meeting, so this must be DSS!

Dankawalie Secondary School, located in Dankawalie village eighteen miles east of Kabala, has hosted a Young Writers club for 5½ years now, and what can we say,  it just keeps improving! As you can see from the photo, there is ample space in the school library for their meetings, where there is often content conferencing going on as well as peer and teacher editing groups. I conducted a mini-lesson on Friday using The Shy Scarecrow by Mary Packard, to demonstrate how the students can read books aloud to their younger brothers and sisters using the library's picture book section.

The club meets from 7:00 to 8:30 am twice a week before school. The corridor you see in the photo that looks out over the rest of the school, is where they wait to enter the library. The 30-or-so members work throughout the 1½ hours and the time is never enough. They prefer early morning meetings to staying after school, when many have family duties to carry out or public exam prep lessons to attend. We expect that at least three members will have earned "My Life" booklets this year, having progressed all the way through final drafts of five or more personal experiences. In anticipation, they have already prepared their book dedications and "about the author" paragraphs.

Unfortunately, the wonderful light you see in the library is soon to dim: it and the light in the other classrooms comes from a few translucent pans in the roof which turned out to be of such poor quality that they melted, turned brittle, and leaked their substances onto the corrugated sheets near them, eroding them as well, so before the rains begin we will be replacing them with regular zinc sheets. We are constantly struggling against the poor quality of imported building materials in Sierra Leone. Hopefully, before too long someone will make available good quality translucent roofing sheets and we will be able to get our light back. 

The Verbs Have It

In a class where English language learners are thinking of personal experience topics to write about, the verbs have it. The verb is crucial when you are trying to convert a whole experience into a topic of a few words. These class 4 and 5 children know the verb in Krio, but not in English:

skrap (cut) wun / bɔs (injured) ros (burnt) balans (swerved to avoid) fɔdɔm (fell) tif (stole)

ledɔm (lay) fɛt (fought) bang (hit) pat dɛn (stopped the fight) wan day (almost died) bɔk mi fut (stubbed my toe)

Working with Primary Schools

SELI Young Writers clubs have begun in the schools that participated in our March 5th workshop. As I go around to visit them this week, I have seen a lot of careful listening and thinking, as you see these class four and five students from R.E.C. Primary School, Bassa Town and R.E.C. Primary School, Kent doing here, as we work on the rehearsal stage of writing.

Learning to facilitate a Young Writers club is a transformative experience for teachers, because it means conducting a child-centered classroom.  I find these teachers, just as I have found so many

others, most willing to learn the role so long as someone is at their elbow for a while reminding them: let the topics come from the child's own experience, let the child choose which topic to write on, let the children decide when they need to stamp a new piece of paper, or staple their papers together. . . and in the end they are always astonished that it's actually in the children to do all these things. Soon we're all experiencing an elevated respect for the children's ability to listen and think.