Monday is writing day where we aim to improve English writing and grammar skills.
Tuesday is Biology day where we teach all about the body, health and hygiene.
Wednesday is cooking class day (a strong favourite)!
Thursday alternates between Maths and any other ideas we have for that week.
Friday is film day followed by writing a film review.
The level of English varies quite a lot between all the children. The two eldest girls at the orphanage thought to be ~ 14 & 16 years have quite good English conversational skills, although they can get very mixed up with tenses. Their writing is fairly good as well, but they lack basic grammar skills like punctuation. Just now I am working my way through an age 6-7 English grammar & writing book with them.
The next age down approx 8-12 years can understand very basic English conversation - they tend to recognise key words and work from there. They struggle with writing and even copying word for word can be a challenge for some: they get letters muddled up and have no concept of the appropriate ways to use capital and small letters. I also feel that a couple of these children may be dyslexic as they have similar problems with their own Khmer language reading and writing. They also don't understand phonics so sounding the words out does not help at all - therefore unless you specify the letter to use it can be difficult for them to spell anything and for you to teach them to spell independently.
The younger ones below this know the alphabet to read and say, but still get very mixed up with it; the same goes for counting 1-10. Some of the brighter, younger ones are starting to pick up key words they hear you say and understand them, but generally they only understand things like name, yes, no, TV! and sleep - English apart from this is really non-existent. This is not a criticism; these children are after all coming from the most difficult of backgrounds you could ever imagine and English is a second language for them. If this had perhaps been made a little clearer before I came I would have prepared differently, but even something as simple like getting the children in a circle for a game is a mammoth task! Often it takes one of the older girls to translate.
One of the activities we done with the younger children was reading a story about Elmer the elephant and decorating Elmer drawings with lots of coloured paper to teach them names of colours.
*Please note this image is not my own.
The Elmer wall display
To follow on from the colours theme we did coloured hand prints and also made another wall display to decorate the nursery. We incorporated numbers into this as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment