Hello from Hawassa!
I got here on Tuesday evening, after a long day of driving from Addis. Hawassa about 270 km south of Addis and is built next to a large lake. I'll be based here for the next 2 weeks, helping to train the regional teams on how to develop student books and teacher guides for reading and writing. As you can see, we are focusing on the mother tongue curriculum for grades 5-8.
There are 7 different teams working on 7 different languages: Sidaamu Afoo, Amharic, Afan Oromo, Hadiyyisa, Af-Soomaali, Wolayttatto and Tigrinya. At the beginning of August, each team will go back to their region to continue their work.
This week I was assigned to support the team from the Somali region of Ethiopia, since they seem to be struggling the most. Since all of the lessons are being written in Somali, there is a lot of translating back and forth. Some of the topics we covered: the difference between text-based and inferential questions and why it is important to use both when teaching; why one should consider having images or graphics in texts for grades 5-8; what it means to preview text features before reading and how to select appropriate vocabulary for direct instruction.
Here's the building where we're working:
(donkey carts and motos are popular modes of transport in Hawassa)
This is a view of the inside:
To get the full effect, you have to imagine the fact that, when it rains, water pours through the seams in the glass ceiling and into the atrium, runs down the stair cases, and floods the landings at each level. Luckily our room seems to be water tight, so none of our masses of hand-written lessons have been ruined.
You can get a bit of a sense of the piles of paper that we use everyday in this picture:
(these are the papers just for the Af-Soomaali Grade 5 team for one day)
I'll write more as internet access permits. I'll leave you with a picture of the local State Education Bureau's approach to promoting girls' access to education (the top line is written in Amharic script).
I got here on Tuesday evening, after a long day of driving from Addis. Hawassa about 270 km south of Addis and is built next to a large lake. I'll be based here for the next 2 weeks, helping to train the regional teams on how to develop student books and teacher guides for reading and writing. As you can see, we are focusing on the mother tongue curriculum for grades 5-8.
There are 7 different teams working on 7 different languages: Sidaamu Afoo, Amharic, Afan Oromo, Hadiyyisa, Af-Soomaali, Wolayttatto and Tigrinya. At the beginning of August, each team will go back to their region to continue their work.
This week I was assigned to support the team from the Somali region of Ethiopia, since they seem to be struggling the most. Since all of the lessons are being written in Somali, there is a lot of translating back and forth. Some of the topics we covered: the difference between text-based and inferential questions and why it is important to use both when teaching; why one should consider having images or graphics in texts for grades 5-8; what it means to preview text features before reading and how to select appropriate vocabulary for direct instruction.
Here's the building where we're working:
This is a view of the inside:
You can get a bit of a sense of the piles of paper that we use everyday in this picture:
I'll write more as internet access permits. I'll leave you with a picture of the local State Education Bureau's approach to promoting girls' access to education (the top line is written in Amharic script).
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