Projects Abroad Teaching.

Teaching in South Africa
Before the lockdown, I managed to visit South Africa to volunteer with Projects Abroad as a teacher in Cape Town.

I worked at Fairview Primary School, teaching English Literacy and concentrating on developing creative learning.

Fairview is a well organised and well resourced school with children who behave politely. They have good basic skills in English and learn Afrikaans as a second language. In addition, they are starting to learn Xhosa.

I am a retired teacher and it was certainly useful to be able to fit in with the school curriculum. Some of the younger children were doing tests and they also prepared talks about their own religion. These were presented to the class.

I took small groups out of the class to work on sentence structure, aiming to create complex sentences and also worked on story planning and other creative ideas.

I presented performance poetry in a number of different whole class sessions, using a drum and simple African percussion instruments. This was very enjoyable and well received by the children. I think it was good to bring something different to the classes.

I also worked with some of the older children developing creative language and reading about the life of Nelson Mandela. I asked 12 year olds why the vote was important but they did not seem to know. I explained that people were not important if they did not have the vote. Of course we all take it for granted that we can vote and yet it is only 26 years ago that many people in South Africa voted for the first time.

Although they live near to Robben Island, they had not visited the World Heritage Site.

Is twelve years too young to make such a visit? It was pointed out that the crossing can be quite rough. When I went to Robben Island a few years ago, the sea was a bit rough but this time, I visited again and it was a beautiful calm sea on a sunny day.

I think that it was useful being an experienced teacher, because I was able to fit in with the school. I prepared my own work and brought materials from the UK. Certainly, in the school I was in, it would be possible to prepare work because they had a good library but this would take time out of lessons and this would be a shame. I did use some additional poetry books from the school library to add to my own poetry collection for performance.

Projects Abroad had not had any teacher volunteers for some time and I feel that retired teachers would help the children here and would enjoy the experience. I think that being flexible in your attitude and approach is the most important attribute a volunteer can have.