Computer Classes

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to post! I keep meaning to then I don’t and forget all about it. I’m such a terrible blogger :) Life has consisted of a lot of school. Doing school at home, teaching at the school, going home and finishing my school!

I’ve started teaching computers! It’s so much fun!! I teach 5 days week (if there is power at the school, or if they have the keys) from 2-3.

When the parents of the students found out that there was going to be a computer class they started cheering! Then when they saw the computers they started crying. This is the first time that most of the parents, children, and some of the teachers have ever seen a computer. So on the first week of teaching I had teachers and parents coming in and out of the computer room. I love seeing the children’s faces light up when they walk into the room and see the computers. They get so excited when I go to their classes and call their names for computers :) I started off teaching the children how to turn the computer on, not the touch the screen, or to slam on the mouse and keyboard. Then I opened Wordpad and had the children write their names, which was easy for some and hard for others. I had them type their names for the first couple of weeks.

At lunch, the children come up to me and say “Auntie, am I doing computers today?” Then I had the children type the alphabet. I have one boy in my class who doesn’t know English or Luganda (which is the main language here other than English) so my mom (bless her for it) wrote a chart of the alphabet for him to copy off of. Once he got the hang of it he does great :)

This week I’m having the children type 1-20! It’s gone pretty good; I have classes who totally get it, then other classes who look at me utterly confused. But they don’t totally get the concept of writing double-digit numbers, they don’t get writing 1 then 2 for 12. So they search the keyboard for the key 12. And what TOTALLY confuses them is uppercase “I“ they expect it to look like this “I” but on the keyboard it looks like I (just a line) so that gets confusing.

After numbers, I’m going to have them start writing words, then writing sentences with the beginning being uppercase and have a period at the end. Then I’m going to have them write a color and have the text being that color, and then I’m going to teach them about the mouse, by having them do paint :) That will be exciting. Hopefully next term we’re going to have video cards in the computers so we can run Jumpstart Kindergarten. The kids will LOVE that!

One day I was teaching and one of the teachers came in. She watched for a minute, which I was used to, then she asked me if I’d teach the teachers computers. I told her to talk to Aunt Cari, who agreed, and so on Tuesdays I teach the teachers computers from 3-5 after I finish teaching the children. The teachers catch on MUCH faster than the children, so I was having them type and they looked at me and said “Merisha (they think that’s my name), teach us more.” I asked them what they wanted to learn, and they told me they wanted to learn how to upload pictures on Microsoft Word, how to change the color of the text, how to change fonts, the size, how to underline, and how to make a list. Thank the Lord I had my mom there to help :)

One day our neighbors’ house help (Teddy) asked Laura to teach her computer and Laura told her that I taught at the school, so she asked me to teach her. So now on Sundays I teach her computers :) It is much easier teaching someone 1 on 1 than teaching 4 kids at once or 4 teachers at once.

So that’s what I do most of the week!

I promise I’ll try to be a better blogger!