notrefined: Story time with Dolphin Group! These...

Story time with Dolphin Group! These are my mid-level Year 5′s, and some of my absolute favorite kids to work with. Lil’ rays of sunshine.
Obviously I came to Samoa to teach literacy skills, and that comes with unit plans, and worksheets, and two-sentence books that heavily favor the “-at” family and all that. But another really important part of teaching literacy is teaching a love of reading, of stories, for their own sake. So sometimes you’ve gotta throw the lesson plans out the window and just have fun with books!
For story time, the kids get three options and vote on which two they want to read. Every character gets a ridiculous voice, I ask them things for each page like “What color is the house?” “Who can point to the ‘octopus’?” to make sure they’re not mentally wandering off, and we talk about the story in Samoan as we go to make sure everyone’s following along. And they LOVE it!!
You can spend your entire service trying to teach kids to read, but unless they understand what reading is, the magic of a book — you’re just not going to get very far. Take some time for that.

Peace Corps Samoa Pacific Islands education teaching