Today, we rocked up at the school bright and early to find the children settling down to start their day. This morning’s task was all about learning the English alphabet. Each child had a ‘D’ drawn on their books and they had to cut out and stick on pieces of paper like a mosaic. This would help them to learn the shape and remember it. This task was not as easy as it seemed as children and adults alike became absolutely covered in glue! However, we all had lots of fun and shall continue this exercise with the rest of the alphabet in future. The mornings with the pre-school children seem to fly by and soon enough it was time for them to leave us, waving and calling ‘bye!’ to us as the bounced out of the school with their parents. We then had an hour to prepare for teaching the older children in the afternoon. This involved preparing various models to show the children what to make (it absolutely necessary with the language barrier to have examples to overcome the language barrier!) We then went off to another ever-welcoming family’s home for a delicious lunch of curry, rice, noodles, bananas, pineapple and our favourite – honey and curd! The Sri Lankan diet is absolutely delicious, perhaps too delicious, the waistband on my trousers are telling me!

The afternoon was a success teaching body parts which we then turned into a game outside, to reinforce what the children had been learning. It became a simplified version of ‘Simon Says’, being that they pointed out the body part we named as fast as they could. Yet more games of cricket and volleyball followed. Unfortunately both my cricket and volleyball skills are minimal, but I’d like to think that they are slowly improving.