18th - 20th January 2007

Thursday 18th January

This morning I was back at Siri Sumana School. I had the same 5 grade 4 classes as previously, and I was teaching pronunciation, focusing on “f” and “s”. With the “f”, it is distinguishing it from a “p” that is the challenge, and I found it helpful to draw a face in profile on the blackboard clearly showing that the top teeth are on the bottom lip, and the lips never touch. I also walked round the classroom helping any children who found this particularly difficult. I introduced a few words such as “friend”,” football”l, “Friday”,” favourite”, “Food City”, and “knife” and these helped a great deal. One or two did find this extremely difficult, really not managing to get far beyond “booboll” for “football”. Although I’m not comfortably with this failure, in context, 2 out of about 150 isn’t too bad, so I had about a 95% success rate.

With the “s”, it is particularly words starting with a “s” sound followed by a consonant that are big problems. I introduced a few words such as “sport”,” spoon”, and “snake”. The natural pronunciation for a Sinhala speaker would be “isport”, “isnake” and “ispoon”. They have no difficulty whatsoever in pronouncing words like “Sam” and “Saturday” but even after 20 minutes on the “s” sound, there were still a few children in each class who really could not say “Ssssssssam…sssssssport”. It would still come out as “Ssssssssam…ssssss-isport" I wrote some sentences on the board to put these words into context, and the majority of each class managed them ok:

“My favourite sport is football.”
“Sam eats his food with a spoon.”
“On Friday I saw two snakes.”

I think by the 3rd or 4th class today I had developed a pattern of teaching to make it relatively easy for them. The first two classes I took were quite rowdy, and rather disobedient. I’m sure this is because I was alone with them, and the usual teacher was not there. I did my best to be cross with them, but there was still an unruly element. During the interval I addressed this with the principle, and from then on the school’s English teacher accompanied me. This helped to keep the order and greatly aided the learning process.

This afternoon I was at Nirasha School, and I got the world atlas to teach a bit of fundamental geography prior to reading the children an Indian counting rhyme called Engines, Engines. This is one of the books I salvaged from Bradford Library. The brief geography lesson took longer than I’d hoped, but it was a success. It was harder than I’d anticipated to teach the children the question / answer couplet:

Mr. Albert: “Where is xxxxx?”
Pupil: “xxxxx is here.”

Friday 19th January

Back at Ranapanediniya School this morning I just took 2 classes, one either side of the mid-morning interval. In the first I did as I had done at Siri Sumana School yesterday, teaching the “f” and “s” sounds. Copying is a problem in all the classes I take. When marking work I often see the same errors crop up in several children’s books.

I ended the lesson with some dictation, which was actually the request of one of the pupils. I told them a few things about myself, and asked them to write down what I’d said. This was useful for them, and for me to where judge listening and comprehension skills.

After the interval I took grade 11, and using coloured chalk taught them The Rainbow Song. They learnt it well, so I recorded it onto Minidisc. I then gave them an About Me exercise in anticipation of next week’s lessons when I hope to help them write letters to their pen-friends at Melbourn Primary School in Royston, Hertfordshire.

I’m going to have to be careful what I say in Sinhala. Nalinda and his friends, and some of the school children have all picked up on my interest in learning some Sinhala phrases, and I get the impression that some of the words they want me to say may not be of wholesome content. Today’s grade 11 class got me to say something that I instantly regretted. I think it meant “black elephant” and was an insult directed towards a boy whose skin was darker and more abundant than that of the majority. I feel terrible about that, but I had no idea I was being coaxed into such a cruel remark. He may not have heard of course, but I think he might have done.

The afternoon session at Baranasooriya Boys’ Orphanage was a washout. I got there to find they had changed their minds about when they wanted me to teach, so I’ll have to come back on Tuesday.

Saturday 20th January

Today I took the children from Nirasha School on a day trip to Galle. I hired Lahiru and his van to take the 12 kids, 5 parents and Mrs. Mendis round a few sites Nalinda had suggested. We visited the Rumassala Reserve first. Here there’s a beautiful Japanese Dagoba at the top of a hill with a stunning view across Galle, and at the bottom, a nice little beach. The area is known to be a rich source of medicinal herbs. This is purportedly because a giant mythical monkey dropped part of a mountain here when flying over from India.

We then went to Dharmapala Park where the children enjoyed the playground and had lunch. Nalinda’s original idea was that I could buy them all pizza for lunch but I wasn’t happy about that, so they all had a packed lunch with them. It wasn’t simply the cost of the food that put made me reticent. Relatively speaking, the cost of pizza for 12 kids here isn’t much, and I had happily paid the fan hire charge, and later the museum entrance fee. The thing is, I felt uncomfortable with the thought of being the affluent Westerner, encouraging these impressionable youngsters to poo-poo their local, traditional, wholesome foods in favour of our foods. I haven’t put that very well, but there is a genuine point in there somewhere. I did buy them ice-creams after lunch. Yes ok, that’s hardly encouraging a local, healthy diet, but I didn’t want to seem like an old bore, and it was a Sri Lankan brand so at least I wasn’t supporting N****é!

In the afternoon we went to the Galle National Museum. This contains Portuguese, Dutch and Buddhist artefacts, and Mrs. Mendis explained them to the children in Sinhala. The final stop was at Galle Fort, which was built by the Portuguese in, I think, the early 17th century.

I’m not doing too badly with the local lingo. As well as figuring out for myself how to ask Mrs. Mendis about her fingers which I trapped in the van door (“aththa kohamada”) tonight I managed to go into Food City and successfully ask for 4 bottles of water!

“Mata wattura boathal haturak denna.”