All about South Africa

Now with the Olympics, each class at Bianca and Caitlyn's school was given a country that they will be learning about.  Paul chose South Africa for his class, Bianca's class will learn about Germany and Caitlyn's class will be looking at Brazil. 

Because of my South African heritage, Paul asked if I would be able to come to his class every so often to share some information with the kids and so the other day I did a bit of an Afrikaans lesson. 

The Afrikaans language is actually quite hard if you are not familiar with it.  It has the same letters as in English, but some of the sounds are very different.  For instance we pronounce 'g' and 'r' quite different to how you would say it in English.

So on this day I mostly taught them a few phrases like "good morning", "thank you very much", "I like reading", "good bye" and so on.  The kids did so well repeating what I said and they were all keen to have a go on their own.

This afternoon I did another session.  After the last session, the kids had so many questions.  They wanted to know where I was born, which school I went to, about food and animals and clothing.  So today I put together a presentation with photos to share with them.  They were all so interested and it was a lot of fun sharing this with them.

Here are some of the photos I shared with them:

My very first day of school

The local swimming pool

The town where I grew up in had a lot of trees lining the streets

Afterwards Paul and the kids sang some songs as a thank you.  They did a great job!