25th - 30th January 2007

Thursday 25th January

At Ranapanediniya School, K. Premasiri was absent today, but I feel I made good progress with the classes I took. With year 6 I did my male/female friends exercise, and with both years 10 and 11 I did something slightly different. Using the school’s electric keyboard I taught them “You are my sunshine” and went on to give a couple of exercises based on the weather.

This afternoon I was at Baranasooriya Boys' Orphanage, where I covered quite a bit of ground. I used the big atlas I brought over, to do the “Where is …..?” / “…..is here.” Exercise. I taught them some common nouns using my flashcards and we played hopscotch to learn numbers.

Friday 26th January

At Siri Sumana School today I intended to use my “What’s the Time?” OHP sheets, but it just wasn’t meant to be. Firstly, I hadn’t realised a two socket adapter would be needed for the English power cable. Once we had power, I found the classrooms were too light, and there wasn’t a suitable blank wall space. I’ve told Nalinda and he’s going to speak to the principle about finding a suitable place for the projector. So, instead I did some Time exercises using the blackboard. But because I had to write it out for each of the five 30-minute classes, I had to make the exercises fairly brief.

In fact, I’ve found that because there are five grade 4 classes, and each only gets ½ hour, I’ve not made as much headway as I have at the smaller Ranapanediniya School, where lessons are 40-minutes long. Also I seemed to pitch my first few day’s exercises too high - many of the children don’t actually have the vocabulary to understand the topic, so I’ve had to adjust my lessons as I’ve gone along. It’s a shame there are so many classes, because given a whole morning with a single class, I’m sure I could make more progress. It would also give me chance to vary the exercises, and maybe throw a song into the mix as well. But in 30 minutes, there’s just not time.

I’ve still got problems with naughty children. More so at Siri Sumana School than the other schools. I’ve found that a fairly good way to deal with them is to make them stand up and read out, or sing, whatever we’re working on alone. One thing that does work well, with good kids and bad alike is giving them exercise to write in their books that I can then mark. The prospect of a red tick, and a comment seems to really get them writing!

This afternoon at Nirasha we did some Friends exercises, and before a torrential downpour played hopscotch outside.

Saturday 27th – Tuesday 30th January

During these four days I went on a trip around some of Sri Lanka’s historic sites in the Cultural Triangle, which embraces Kandy, Dambulla, Sigiriya, Polonnaruwa and Anuradhapura. I hired Lahiru as my driver. I can highly recommend you make a similar journey if you are reading this as a prospective volunteer in Sri Lanka and you have enough time. I’ve written a far more lengthly summary of the trip, which I can email to you if you wish.