Hey! I’m Kevin and in less than two weeks I’ll be stepping off the plane in Accra, Ghana. I and 10 other Westtown students will be spending a little over two weeks teaching classes at Heritage Academy, helping to build additional classrooms for the school, and visiting local villages and various historic sites.

I jumped at this opportunity earlier this year when we were first presented with the challenge of choosing a Senior Project, and my excitement has only grown since then. I think the thing that appealed the most to me about this opportunity was the chance to teach children who don’t take for granted the importance of a good education. I’ve had a chance to teach a German class or two here at Westtown, and have enjoyed each one, but it’s one thing to teach 18 kids at Westtown who just want to get to lunch, and another to teach a group of children who view school as a privilege. With this in mind, I set myself the task of coming up with a lesson plan that would be informative, challenging, and yet more interesting than an average, run-of-the-mill class.

One day an idea just came to me, and I hope it’ll work out well. I thought it might be cool if the kids worked in small groups of 3-4 to make basic story books. At first, I thought it might be too simplistic and childish for Middle Schoolers, but T. Kwesi convinced me otherwise, and I’m going ahead with my idea. I figured it’d be a good way for them to learn about things like paragraph structure, plot lines, sensory details, character descriptions and the like. Allowing them to fill the pages with illustrations would also give them a creative outlet, and since kids don’t have art classes at Heritage Academy, I thought this might make the class a little different and hopefully more interesting.

All in all, I just can’t wait to go. In fact, I’m ready to step on the plane right now. It’s going to be great to go somewhere completely different from anywhere that I’ve gone before, and to try something new and meaningful.

Talk to you all later,

Kevin