Today was the penultimate day at Siddhartha College for my group. This week we had planned all our lessons around the theme of animals.
It was a really good theme as it enabled us to expand into colours, numbers (“there is one blue elephant”) and sizes (“bigger than” and “smaller than”). The first few days of the week I had been really nervous about standing up and teaching however today I felt much more comfortable with raising my voice and (particularly during the singing parts) sounding like a complete loon!

The first class went pretty smoothly and they seemed to grasp the idea of comparative sizes pretty well. After teaching the concept of “bigger than” and “smaller than” yesterday we had moved onto showing them that certain animals were bigger than some animals whilst at the same time being smaller than others (i.e. “the dog is bigger than the spider but smaller than the elephant”). The second class was a little more difficult to teach as even the bright pupils were screaming the answers so loudly that the quiet kids at the back of the class had no chance! We got through it in the end after resorting to “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” for the last ten minutes!! I was really glad Hannah Williams was there with me! Things did pick up for the last class and we really enjoyed singing “from the tiny ant” with them with all the actions!

After attempting to eat the huge rice packets we were given for lunch we headed off to teach the after school classes. This was really fun as we recapped all the stuff on the body that we had covered all this week before moving on to teaching on the topic of “my village”. This went down fairly well and by the end of the class the kids all knew to get their ice cream from the ice cream shop and their fish from the fishmongers! To wrap things up we sang the Travel Song that Chris had already taught them last week and true to his word we sang the first few words and the kids pretty much finished the rest of it off for us with particular emphasis on “tuk-tuk” as usual!!!

I have had such a great time at Siddhartha this week; it has been really tiring and busy but it has also been one of the most fulfilling things that I have ever done! Other highlights have included; having to be called Helen to avoid confusion because Hannah and I both have the same name, getting covered in chalk pretty much every day and getting the whole of year 3 and 4 to sing the travel song in unison at the end of the week. Overall it was a fantastic week!