Monday 27 February 2017

Birthday


At the start of February KISC celebrated its 30th birthday! Formed in 1987 as a small study centre for about a dozen or so children secondary aged children, it has changed a lot in the last 30 years.

Since then it has grown to around 220 students, ranging from 4 to 19 years old. We also work with several partner schools in 3 regions of Nepal through our teacher training branch EQUIP. We support another similar school in Pokhara and there is the plan and vision to start a teacher training college in the next few years. We also have a new site to move to hopefully by the end of this year, with our own buildings, after 30 years of nomadic existence.

It’s an exciting time to be part of KISC and we are privelleged to be able to play a role in the work that is going on at KISC. We came for 2 years nearly a decade ago, and it has proven to be a big part of our lives.

The birthday itself has become our Global Day of Prayer for KISC, this year was the 3rd time we’ve held this. We had people from all around the world sign up to pray for KISC. Then on the following day we had a community lunch, a special service of celebration and of course, cake! Part of the service included a video showing the history of KISC, which you can watch here if you'd like. 

Happy Birthday KISC!


Sunday 26 February 2017

CELTA

This is a very delayed blog!  Back in November I (Becky) completed a CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to speakers of other Languages) course. This is an intensive 4 week course run by the British Council in Nepal but awarded by Cambridge English in the UK.

About 60% of our students at KISC speak English as their second language (ESL) and so over our time here we have learnt to adapt our teaching to support these ESL students and help them to access their education. In the autumn of 2015 the opportunity came up for me to cover an ESL teacher for 6 months while she was on home leave. I enjoyed working with the ESL students, directly supporting them as they worked to improve their English and therefore access their education better. I decided that I'd like to stay teaching ESL.

So this school year I have been working solely in the ESL department working with students in years 1, 2 and 6. It has been a big change from teaching Secondary Geography, and so the CELTA course provided some much needed training!

With my certificate
As I mentioned above it is an intensive course, 5 days a week full time plus working every evening and weekend to get assignments and lesson plans done. It was exhausting. Nine of us started the course and only six passed which shows you how grueling it was. The course looked at the theory of teaching English through classes every morning plus practical experience as we taught either beginner or intermediate level students each afternoon.

I certainly felt like I had earned my certificate by the end. It was a tough course, but rigorous.

The course finished two weeks before the end of KISC school's term so I returned to work for two weeks before a well earned break over Christmas and New Year. Now I have to apply all I learned.