Today Hannah Williams, Alex, Ed and I all went to Aththudawa, where we shall remain for the rest of the week. Hannah, Alex and I are teaching whilst Ed starts with the drawing of the design onto the school for us to paint in the future. We arrived gracefully with four people squeezed into a tuk-tuk (me perched on someone’s’ lap) to a classroom of only three students in the pre-school. It had been raining in the morning long before we were up so the majority of children had stayed off school, which was unfortunate. We sung various nursery rhymes the children already knew in English such as twinkle twinkle little star, the wheels on the bus and their personal favourite – I found a peanut. We then made pasta pictures with them, the hardest part was stopping the children eating the raw pasta but it was still good fun and allowed the children to practice their English too with the images they had to stick on. We plan to paint the pictures tomorrow with glitter paint and use them to decorate the very bare looking classroom.

We finished at 11:30pm and then went to a local teachers (not from Aththudawa) house in the village for lunch. It was delicious once again and we had an assortment of curry dishes such as daal, fish curry, breadfruit curry and green bean curry along with rice and popadoms as usual. For dessert we were served ice-cream and palm treacle in which most of us had two helpings!! After lunch we returned to the school for our afternoon class at 1:30pm, we picked up most of the children on the walk back so were ready to start straight away.

We had about 20 children of varying ages turn up; the club lasted for an hour and a half in total and was the most enjoyable afterschool club I have experienced so far! The children were all really friendly and keen, the girls all wanted to hold our hands and touch Hannah and my hair as it is blonde whilst Alex played ball games with the boys outside. Their English was exceptional so it was really easy to communicate and organise activities to do, the session went so quickly. We focused about half an hour on teaching English in which we had basic conversations with the children to learn more about themselves and so that they can practise their English. As they were all different ages and therefore abilities it was a good activity to adapt.

We finished at 3:00pm and didn’t want to leave, the children were all holding on to us begging us not go and that they didn’t want to go home yet, one girl even tried to take me to visit her house! We had such a great time and I can’t wait to spend the rest of the week here.