Today Joe, Alice, Nic and Dhanya were in Kirelawela. We spent the morning with the pre-school children, who for some reason (perhaps all the excitement from the Pera Hera festival in Dondra) were far more energetic and distracted than they had been earlier in the week.Nevertheless we continued to reinforce the vocabulary we have been teaching them from the beginning: colours, numbers and the alphabet. We ended the morning by singing a few rounds of The Wheels on the Bus, which the children are finally beginning to be able to sing on their own. School finished at 11.30 as usual, and at noon we walked into the village and enjoyed a large lunch prepared by the family of one of the pre-school students.
In the afternoon we returned to the pre-school to host the various after-school activities: Alice taught the girls a brief dance routine; Joe gave some of the older children an English lesson about nouns, verbs and adjectives; Nic organised a craft activity that involved making and decorating paper cut-outs; and Dhanya played sports with the children outdoors. These afternoons have been especially rewarding as they provide many teaching opportunities and time for the older village children to practice their English with us. Over the past week we have gotten to know many of them well, and it was very difficult to tell them that we would not be returning to Kirelawela for a while.