20th December - Day 19

First TEFL session for children today.

This session was for children (aged 3-5) who attended the school at the Training Centre, and their parents, to learn English. Everyone did a basic introduction saying their name, how old they were and how many brothers and sisters they had - this enabled us to see that we had some with no English at all and others with a basic understanding!

The group had 39 people in it, aged from 10months old to 64years and was a mix of boys, girls, men and women. Everyone was really enthusiastic, joining in with all of the activities, games and songs. Having learnt some body parts, numbers, fruit, veg and colours the group decided their favourite song was the Hokey Kokey - which got repeated several times in the session!

Throughout the training the odd mother and child would disappear and then reappear with the child in a yellow dress or red shorts, until all of the children from the school were dressed in matching outfits! They then performed two dances for us, a girls one and a boys one - they were very cute!

We stopped for lunch and the group thanked us for the training. They hadn't intended on returning after lunch it appeared, although we had planned for a second session. After a bit of discussion several of the parents seemed keen to return after lunch for more English activities!

The afternoon's session only had 15 returning participants but they enjoyed it just as much as they had done in the morning. We were also brought some food to try by one of the families - mankavum (battered greengram), athirasa (brown stuff - not sure what!) and ambrella (a fruit that tasted a bit like fresh peas).

We offered to run another session tomorrow morning, but they again looked confused - who knows if anyone will turn up!

Straight after the afternoon session we had been invited to join a campfire with the Guides who were camping at the Training Centre. These girls were also the ones we had seen at the flying up ceremony in Colombo a few weeks ago! The girls took it in turns to lead a song and the patrols each performed sketches. We were invited to join in and lead a few songs as well.