Today was ‘Poya’ day in Sri Lanka which is a religious day in which all the schools are closed for the day to allow the locals to attend the local temple, so today we had no plans within the schools to teach…

Helen, Hannah G, Phil and Abi were invited to the temple in Gandarawatte by the local monk to join the village in their celebrations for Poya day. They reported that they were warmly greeted once again and were offered breakfast which was closely followed by lunch and attended the temple to witness a few prayers and offerings. The monk then blessed each member and presented each with a lovely colourful cotton wristband – which I am very jealous of!

For those of us which did not visit the temple, we had a lie-in before planning our lessons for school again tomorrow. Hannah W, Alex and I are once again visiting Hiththatiya which is a pre-school of around 30 students, we teach the pre-school from around 9am until 11:30am and then run an after school club from 2pm until 4pm. Wednesday was our first afterschool club and we were astonished with the number of children we had attend, about 50 in total! We decided to split the boys and girls into two as each wanted to do a slightly different activity. Hannah took the girls inside to do some dancing and singing whilst Alex and I stayed outside with the boys to play football and volleyball, it was really good fun but so hot! They all seemed really keen to come to our next session on Friday in which the girls asked if they could just chat with us so that they could practise their English! This day was by far my favourite and most enjoyable day of the trip so far and cannot wait to go back again on Friday!

The pre-school children are very well behaved and really eager to learn, there is a wide range of abilities in the class but they all seem to grasp the activities we set really quickly and really seem to enjoy themselves! The teacher within the school is also really lovely and has fairly good English, she is a great help within the class as she translates what we are asking the children to do into Sinhala. This week we have been focused on teaching the children the colours red, yellow, green and blue and also then moved onto basic actions such as dance, sing, swim, drink, run, hop and swim. We have managed to incorporate sport, arts and also singing into the lessons for example we had the children running to the correct colour we called out in the garden and then set a colouring exercise which involved the colours and the actions.

I have really enjoyed teaching within Hiththatiya this week and found the children and school very welcoming, I must also congratulate the 2009 Project Sri Lanka team for the decoration of the school, it is very colourful and the school looks really nice!