There are two groups of children at the orphanage. The younger children are taught upstairs on the veranda. They are generally about 5-10 years old. But there are some who are older who have stayed behind as they still cannot do their ABC's or counting yet. There are about 16 children in this class. Down stairs, under the orphanage, the older children have a classroom. They range from about 11-14 years old and have about 12 students in the class.
Nicole teaches the younger age group while Stan teaches the older children. We also have one or two of the orphanage staff members sit in during the teaching. They help to translate and keep the children in order.
Class begins with all the children standing up with their hands together in a "prayer position". All together they count, "one, two, three", then say "hello teacher, how are you today?" We then say "I am very well, how are you?" The kids then say "I am very good" and we ask them to sit down. After a break, they still all stand and say something similar.
Nicole has been going through the ABC's with the younger class. While they know the ABC song, most of them still cannot associate a letter with a word. They know "D" is for dog, because everyone who has taught them uses this example, but they wouldn't know "D" is for desk because it is not something they have been taught. So far Nicole is up to "D" in the alphabet. She has them all come up with "D" words, as many as they can think of and then Nicole adds some more. Nicole is also helping them count. They can count to 100, but after that they thought the next number was one million.
Nicole's class doing a dot to dot exercise.
Khammar using the crayons donated by the Jam Factory in Melbourne.
Sai and Khmoury working on their dot to dots.
Stan has the older children. After discussing what the students need to learn with Mum and others who help at the orphanage, Stan was told that the students should learn to talk in English to each other (rather than just to the ex-pat teachers). Stan has been trying to get them to talk to each other in English, but they didn't want to do it till we turned it into a game. Everyone makes a circle around the classroom by sitting one per desk. Stan starts it off by saying, "Hi my name is Stan, what is your name?". The next child turns the the person behind them and says says "hi, my name is _____, what is your name?" We go around in a big circle till the final child asks Stan again. This wasn't that fun until Stan brought out the timer. Once we started timing how long it took to go around the circle the kids had a ball. Those who forgot the words had 11 others yelling out what they should say. Every time we beat our time, the children would cheer and pound their desks. Stan then asked them if they thought they could do it in less than thirty seconds. They looked quite doubtful, but we gave it a try. Eventually we got to 31 seconds and you should have heard the groans at coming so close. Some of them started yelling at the ones who had forgotten the words and had slowed them down. So we gave it one more try and did the circle in 27 seconds. There were kids jumping up and cheering, pounding their desks and all bragging that they were the quickest. It was quite fun.
We then did a circle race asking how old people were. Some of the children would say, "I am one hundred, hundred million years old". Then the others would all yell at them and tell them off because "one hundred hundred million" took a lot longer to say that "twelve" and they wanted to beat their previous time.
Stan's class has also been working on expressing their feelings in English. We write down 12 feelings on the board, such as happy, sad, angry, sick then make up an action to go with each feeling. Then as a group we say "I am feeling _____" and do the corresponding action. Once everyone knows the word, the meaning and the action, Stan hands out a card with a feeling on it to each child. We then go around the room asking everyone "How do you feel?" The child stands up and says "I am ____" and does the corresponding action on their card.
The day goes smoothly until about 3pm. At this time it is usually incredibly hot and the children are tired and sick of class. The only way to keep them with us is to come up with a fun activity to keep their interest. One day Stan's class learned how to tell the time and then played "What's the time Mr. Wolf?" Well, the moment we started that, Nicole lost control of her class. They all crowded to the side of the veranda and begged Nicole to let them join in.
Stan's classroom is under a tin roof. This means that when it rains it is impossible to hear anyone. The roof also leaks onto a couple of desks. The water pools in the front of the class and Stan teaches standing in a mud puddle. About ten minutes later, a long hoe appeared between Stan's legs and "Dad" made a little trench to drain the water from the front of the class. The mud remained behind though.
Stan's teaching spot
At the end of the day, as we leave, about 20 kids line up on the veranda and yell, "thank you Stan", "thank you Nicole", or "bye Stan and Nicole". We walk away waving and yelling "byeeeeeeee" until we are out of sight.
Well, this is getting a bit long, so we'll stop here and add more later.
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