Teaching and more teaching, 19/07/16

After leaving Garrett to go visit Battanbang, Philippa, Chloe and I got picked up from the hotel at 8am to teach at Piek Snaeng Chas. After the morning hello song, we split them into 3 groups again; each of us taking a group. Using the parachute, I focused on getting them to understand and respond to the questions ‘what is your name?’ and ‘how are you?’. They all did really well and by then of the hour could answer confidently which was fantastic. A lot of the children here are pretty shy and so building up their confidence through games and fun as well as learning has also been a key factor throughout our teaching.

Chloe and Philippa also focused on these questions with their groupsas well and had fun teaching ‘I am good / not good’. We always recap on what we’ve previously taught and so went over numbers, colours etc.

We arrived back at the presbytery around 11am and spent some time planning what we would do that afternoon and tomorrow. There is also a primary school down the road from the church and presbytery and so we decided to go see if we could visit there. However their school times begin at 7am and go until 11 and then the afternoon session is 2pm until 5pm and so we were just a bit to late. We’re going to go tomorrow instead just so that we are able to see the difference between the government school and the kindergartens/learning centres the church run.

We had lunch at a restaurant called the Little Khmer Cafe before going back to the hotel for a shower and a rest. At 3pm we went to explore another market and had an icecream to cool down before it was off teaching again. At 4:30 we went to the student centre to spend time with the uni students before teaching the younger English class at 5:30 for an hour. To begin with we got them to give answers to certain questions which began with ‘who, how, what, when and where’. This worked well and the students were able to answer. We then split them all up into 3 groups again. Philippa taught descriptions of people and did colours and Chloe used flash cards to create basic sentences with her group. She gave each student a card with a item on which they then had to create a sentence around. In my group I did a bit of both with beginning with the flashcards and ending on descriptions although they did get a bit confused about what I was asking. Some of them are also very shy and so it’s hard to know if they understand or are just to shy to say anything so this is something to work on. The teacher is really helpful as he explains to the students in Khmer if they have no idea what we are trying to say and/or describe.

After leaving the students we went to go grab dinner and ended up at the same restaurant we had lunch. The food is really good and very cheap so it was a win win situation! It was then back to the hotel after a lovely meal.