End of Term 1 Final Exams Preparations

As I mentioned in the post last week, we were able to review with the students for their final exams this week. Each day, I focused on a couple sections on their test and though I am still worried about how well some of them will do, I am confident that most have improved from their mid-term exams about a month ago. For the past three weeks, Isaac and I have been splitting the class for English and Math in the morning – they are in two groups, based on their abilities. For the most part, it has been working pretty well. There have been days when I have finished the morning feeling frustrated with one group or the other, and sometimes will all of them; but, being able to work with 30 students at a time instead of 56 does help me gauge how much each student is (or is not) retaining.

They didn’t end up starting their Final exams on Friday – we will begin on Monday with English. It is the only test they have for that day, so I am hoping that all the students will do well since they have time to complete the test. The class will probably be split into two groups to take the exam – one group will stay in to take the test while the other group studies some more. This helps to cut down on students peeping at their neighbor’s paper because they are not sitting so close together.

The rest of the week, the students will be taking two exams each day, which should still give them plenty of time to complete each test. I wrote the exams for Bible Knowledge and Life Skills; the review sessions for these did not go as well as I had hoped, but I was at least able to tell them what was going to be on their exam so they know what to prepare for and study.

Once this coming week of exams is complete, the students (and teachers!) will have 4 weeks of vacation. J I’m sure Kayla and I will get bored eventually, but we are looking forward to having some time off.

Prayers & Praises:

-       As you can read in some other posts & see on Facebook, Thanksgiving was a blast and it was a joy to share it with our friends here in Malawi!

-       Kayla’s birthday was this past Wednesday – most of the students in Standards 4, 5 & 6 made her cards and some even got her some small gifts. They were so excited to be able to celebrate with her! I had one boy in Standard 5 who also had a birthday that day and I think he really enjoyed getting to stand in front of the class with Kayla as we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to them both; Unknown to Kayla and I, the pastor had gathered the teachers together to celebrate Kayla’s birthday with some Cokes. J We had been shopping for our Thanksgiving meal during the lunch break, and they had been waiting for us for almost an hour – oops! We felt a little bad, but it was nice to enjoy a few moments of celebration with the teachers.

I mentioned last week that I had an application to turn in so that I can stay in the country – unfortunately, I haven’t been able to turn it in yet; there were some issues when we went to the Immigration Office on Wednesday (twice! L) and they won’t take the application until everything is with it and completed properly. That was a bit of a frustration on Wednesday, but now I should have everything that I need to turn in and I did find out that it only takes a couple of days for them to process the application – which is good news. Continued prayers that the rest of this process will go smoothly are definitely appreciated!! I just want to put this whole ordeal behind me and not have to worry about it anymore.