Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Oh no! English Assessment!

It was February 21st and the night was chill. Rumah Ilham was unusually quite and both Azura and I were late to the IEP class. We dashed upstairs for the new location, a better and bigger room for the boys to learn English in comfort. This time it was conducted in the new and improved library. We have missed the introduction session last week but this time let the ball rolls, we are anticipating this year’s class since most of the boys will be sitting for their UPSR exams!

Surprisingly only Acat was around at that time and was about to give instructions to the boys for their assessment. We would like to know how each of them fared after a year of IEP classes. The first test is intended to find out how the boys can make their own words derived from the word TEACHER.

The second test was a spelling test derived from pictures from selected books around the library. Thankfully Aidah who came later explained that it needed to be based from simple photos and we have ransacked the library for appropriate ones. There were pictures such as elephant, aeroplane, shark, horse, clown and such. The kids were confused with some Bahasa Melayu spelling but majority of them have done a good job indeed. Abang Acat said he wanted to be the *garang* facilitator that night.
Hmm…looks like he tried his best though.

The last test was conducted shortly for their reading and understanding of a simple story book. Only some of the boys need no help at all on their pronunciation, but most of them still requires help (and some of them are smart enough to narrate the story based on the pictures shown, ehehhe). Aizan, Azura, Acat, Aidah, Chaint and I were there to assess the boys’ reading test and it was done in a jiffy.

We certainly hope that the boys will not be too tired nor sleepy with next time

contributed by,
Anaz

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

tell me what do u see..

for this round of ilham we wanted to test how the children's observation skills are like. we had three kids to one faci, each with a selection of books from the library. and without reading the text, we asked the kids to describe what they see and tell us in their own words.

i personally had one of the kids, syed, to describe to me this story about a family going camping. it had some well drawn scenes in there and syed was able to describe what he thought was happening. there were descriptions like, the racoon was hungry so it sneaked around at the camping site looking for food. how the dad was driving to the camping ground. all this from the pictures that he saw. then just to clarify we had them read some of the text anyways.

afterwards when all of them had their individual go with the abang-kakak, we had everyone in one big group and had them tell us what they see from this one book on community life. (kehidupan berjiran?)

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Lets get it started..

The Ilham English Program is back. We had our first session of the new term. The classes are now held on Tuesdays as opposed to Fridays for the previous term.

For the first session, we felt that a little introduction was due as it had been a while since the last class, two new faces have joined the kids, so what better way to start it all by doing some thing simple like introducing yourself and figuring out the basic information that is required to fill in simple forms.

I was pleasantly surprised when some of the kids remembered the basic things that we taught last term. Your basic 'getting to know' questions. Who are you? How old are you? Where are you from? How many siblings do you have? It shows that they are all eager to learn.

We have made some changes to the new term. We're trying to make the classes more structured. I think this would be a good approach as some of the kids are going to face the dreaded UPSR this year and they'll need all the help that they can get. We still welcome any volunteers who may be interested to join, you know how to contact us if u want to.

So here's to another good year for the IEP.