School

I felt like I was doing a lot around the islands and getting lots from that, but not putting much back in at the school. What with days off and the supply being there etc etc. But that has starting to change this week. Even though school was only from 8am until 9.15am this morning (including breakfast) and only about 8 kids turned up.

I have looked up a few phrases and chatted to the teacher a little. Well, maybe 'chatted' is a misleading word.... Struggled through a basic conversation may be more realistic. The teacher of the class I am in is called Silvia and is really friendly. She has started talking to me a bit more since I looked up the phrases to say to her and explained that I am a teacher at home. I have started taking in the resources I brought bit by bit and they have gone down really well. So thank you to all those who have sponsored me to do it. The kids love them. I am hoping to do a couple of activities with them over the next week and a half, so I will be looking up phrases and making examples to try and explain what they need to do!! I really wish I spoke better spanish as this would have made quite a difference with the volunteering. But I am still really enjoying it.

This is the classroom for the ´'pre-school' class that I teach. There are about 4 of the huts in a cluster when you enter the school, 2 nursery classes and 2 Year 1 classes. The kids in the class are 3 and 4 years old. I realised the other day that there is no glass in the windows, there is just wire mosquito mesh covering them, so when the wind blows, the work goes everywhere, and when it is windy and rainy (which is not that often) you can get a little wet!

This is the playground. I am not sure if it is still under construction, there is definitely work still being done on other buildings, but it is basically volcanic rubble, with different things to climb on and some seesaws. There are no health and safety considerations, and volcanic rubble REALLY hurts. But I haven't seen any real accidents yet. Maybe that is because the kids who were throwing the rocks at each other were not particularly good aims!

There are 20 children in the class and there is quite a mix of abilities, but very little differentiation for skills etc. One of the kids can be very aggressive and messes around a lot, but he is really quite bright and bored half of the time. The other thing I have heard is that there are a lot of single parent families. Apparently there is a high percentage of alcoholism in men here and domestic violence is very common. I have also heard that divorce is expensive, so most people just seperate, split belongings, but don't actually get divorced.

As far as school goes, the class have been doing a lot of work with colours and mixing primary colours to make new colours. Which they found amazing. There is not daily maths and literacy activities that I have seen. The children can count, but there is not regular maths based activities. As far as literacy, they don't seem to know letter names and there are not real literacy based resources in the class. There are a few books, but they are quite old and tatty, and the kids much prefer the jigsaws. They really love doing jigsaws. They do a lot of activities that build up the children's motor skills, lots of fine motor skills development. The other day they coloured in a picture and then instead of cutting it out, they had to tear it carefully to get the shape of the pear, which is actually reall difficult. They do a lot of collage work, finger painting and they use there fingers to put small amounts of glue on their paper. It really works, because they are very good at it and other stuff, like undoing knots and opening zips, some can even tie there shoelaces, which at the age of 4 is pretty impressive.

Here are the kids in the class using the lacing cards that I bought. They really liked them. And this was taken today, we made bracelets with beads which are quite a bit smaller than the ones they are used to- they kept going everywhere, but we finished them and they went down well too!