Nigeria is Wonderful

One week left of my fun adventures in Nigeria.  Since my last post, life has found a lovely rhythm.  Working out, watching a friends choir perform, eating good food, HASHing etc…it has been nice.  Work remains good, even though the kids are getting so excited for the last day of school it is hard to keep them focused on learning.

Since our grades are already done and turned in (but the students do not know that!), I have been having them do projects that they think are just fun and silly, but they are actually learning too.

We started making paper mâché globes – this next week we’ll paint them:

And on Monday they will be performing their rap songs.  We are finishing up a unit on the Heroes Journey in Language Arts so they are creating a rap about a chosen hero.  They had a choice between Greek, Literary, Historical or Unsung heroes.  Here is what the groups chose:  Spiderman, Robin Hood, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela and Abigail Adams.  As of their last rehearsal they were starting to sound pretty good.  It is really fun to see who has a beat and those that don’t.  I’ll try to video tape them and share with you next week.

I finally caught a photo of one of the myriad of lizards that are constantly darting across my footsteps, bobbing their heads up and down.  They are literally everywhere and some have the coolest color combos, but as they are so skittish, it is really hard to get a photo – here is my best one so far:

And I was thrilled to finally be up close and see this magnificent bird:

This of course is not my photo, but I have been seeing flits of red flying by and wondered what it could be.  A couple days ago on a back road driving to drop off a friend’s son, we spotted one sitting right next to the road.  S/he graciously did not fly off for quite some time as we marveled at the bright little creature.  This is a Red Bishop.  There have been so many colorful birds here – gorgeous sky blue, little tiny birds  (think size of a Mouse Tit) and large, golden browns and oranges the size of a large Robin.  I definitely needed a bird book for this part of the world.

I also took my students on a field trip to the Children’s Zoo.

It was a pretty sad place.  Obviously very little funding and it was a massive zoo.  We saw ostrich, zebra, giraffe, wildebeest, crocodiles, gazelle, African golden eagle, tortoise, goats (originally there to feed the lions but the lions died, so now the goats are on display).And lots of monkeys.  Here is one in particular I found fascinating – look for blue.  It wasn’t an anomaly, they all had them!

   On that note… I’ll try to post one more time before I fly back to the USA.

Have a great week!  Gretchen