School: Day 1

Cuisle, Fiona, Daragh and I took an auto-rickshaw to Batra Hospital, then walked down the busy road to our school building in Sangam Vihar. The building is at the very bottom of lane 2 off this road. Inside it has been newly converted, into a school of four classrooms divided by partition walls. Daragh and I are working with the teachers, Monu and Sangeeta, while Fiona and Cuisle are with Usha (who is filling in for Sumon) and Shalini.

The first day was hard work. We arrived at eight but there were no kids there yet. Only at quarter past nine did we have enough children to start class and after that more still strolled in. We taught from 9.15 to 10.30 ("lunch-time") and it felt like forever. We were constantly looking at eachother for things to do. In the class, we covered Introductions, Emotions: I am happy, I am sad, I am angry, I am tired. We also did numbers and simple sums which they already knew! So we quickly moved onto a song: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Once I Caught a Fish Alive. It took is the whole day to get them to remember "once I caught a fish alive." We kept going back to the song, back to the emotions and to My name is... Then we played "The Ball Game" which was very successful.

We all sat in a circle and threw the ball to each other. When we caught the ball, we said our name. First Daragh and I demonstrated, but the kids soon caught on. Daragh and I then sat back to back in the centre of the circle, so that there were two semi-circles. As the kids got the hang of it, we moved onto the full sentence "My name is ___________". It was really good practise and the children really seemed to enjoy it.

I think I got the better semi-circle though. I got lots of the older girls and the quieter boys, whereas Daragh was workins with most of the boys. The ages in the class are as mixed as their abilities. We have 3 year olds to 14 year olds. It's so hard to keep them all interested! The older ones seem to be easy to please however, and it's probably why they stayed in school so long.

After the lunch-break, we moved into Sangeeta's class. Her's is much smaller. While there were about 26 in the first class, there were only about ten in this one. It's totally baffling to me why they split the classes like this. They're definitely not split due to ability and clearly it's not a numbers thing either! It was great to get a second chance to teach the same stuff though. We were able to recycle everything again in this class! And it all ran more smoothly as there were much fewer kids too.

That afternoon was really exciting. The team got back to the apartment and we all shared our stories and experiences. There were a lot of laughs about names and incidents. We had names from Roxanne to a boy who claims to be called "Saddam Hussein."