Amharic school!

I was inspired by several of my friends to try to get together some sort of Amharic playschool for Maya so she can see that Tibby is not the only person in the universe who speaks Amharic. My friend G set up a Saturday playgroup for Lithuanian kids in Cairo. And she really inspired me and gave me lots of ideas.

So now I have set up an "Amharic play" group in Cairo. So far we are three families with five kids total. It is Maya with her nanny Tibby, two other adopted kids with their Ethiopian nanny B, and two kids from an Ethiopian expat family in Cairo with their mom. We had our first "play" yesterday at our house. I think it went relatively well, considering it is the first time and there is a wide age range (2-6) and that all the kids have differing levels of Amharic.

We did a butterfly (birabiro) theme. They talked about birabiros, listened to a birabiro song, did a birabiro craft that I prepared for them, drew birabiros, and danced around to Ethiopian music. They focused on learning the words for the colors birabiros could be and obviously learning the word for butterfly in Amharic.

Since I can't do the Amharic stuff, I decided to become responsible for organising the themes of the day and preparing the crafts. And the native Amharic speakers will do the actual language stuff. So the division of labour is working well.

The only thing I was upset about is that we are doing it during weekdays (since that is when Tibby can be there), so I am working during that time. I arranged to leave work early yesterday so I could be there for the first session, but had an urgent thing come up at work so I ended up missing all but the last few minutes of the play session. Drat! But it seemed that everyone had a pretty good time and all the kids participated to some degree.

It was really good for Maya. When I got home of course she immediately switched to English. But then she got mad because one of the other kids had her book and she asked for it back (in English). I told her to ask him in Amharic and she said: Feleku. Ehia Yeneno (I want that. It's mine) Wow!!! (OK please forgive my bad transliteration). But it is pretty major for me to see Maya speaking to another kid in Amharic.

Anyway, we are going to do next week's session in Zamalek at W's house. She suggested we review colors next week and try to do a session on shapes. So this non-Amharic speaker needs to get some ideas for a craft and project on how to do shapes in a fun way.