During the first term of school (September-December), we had to run a shift system to be able to teach all our classes. Kindergarten 1 and 2 had classes in the morning, while Primary 1 and 2 had classes in the afternoon. This was not ideal and we were dreading the hot season when temperatures reach 45 degrees c in the afternoons. Fortunately, for our second term we were able to return the timetable back to normal thanks to a new building the the District Assembly has built for us. The building was actually built to be used as teachers’ quarters, but we are temporarily using it as classrooms until we are able to build a new school block. So now KG1 and 2 have their own classrooms, P1 has the hut we built last year as a temporary shelter (still standing!) and P2 is occupying the new building. Because the rooms here are smaller we decided to split up the class. We’d been considering this for a little while already, since there were clearly two different abilities of children in P2. In this class, most children have come from other schools originally, and some were clearly ahead of others academically. So now P2a consists of 10 children and P2b of 9. In this way we can target the teaching at their level.
This is of course only a temporary solution, and by September we will definitely need a classroom block as we will have another class to fit in. We’ll keep you posted on this!