Now I know my A, B, C's

Tuesday night we discovered, "Sit @ Side" the neighborhood bar, serving 80 bhat Singha's, where your glass is never empty. Three of the other volunteers and I spent a few hours chatting and having our glasses continously topped off by the ever-attentive bar staff. I am enjoying our group.

Wednesday and Thursday, I volunteered at the local day care with three other volunteers who will be there for their entire stint here. The first day, I was placed with a class of about 20 four-year-olds and handed a little chair and a flip chart of the English alphabet. After a few letters, I realized that these kids must do this every day (and it turns out that they do) because they recited everything back to me perfectly.

Three of the classes are held in one big room, with others held in adjoining rooms off of the main room. The teachers sing songs, it seems, to get the kids back on track when they stray, and the kids are encouraged to yell the songs back as loud as they can (or maybe they just like to yell). Needless to say, it is very loud in there. It seemed that the teachers have to work very hard to be creative to keep the kids focused on them.

The second day, they held an assembly in the main entrance and we were the guests of honor. After introducing ourselves to a room of 200+ kids, "Dichan chu Sharon, ka," we were asked to sing along with some English nursery rhymes, all which involved some sort of motion (Itsy, Bitsy Spider; Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes; Thumbkin, etc.). After that, apparently, we were asked to lead aerobics, something I only picked up on after I noticed one of the volunteers doing the motions first and the kids and teachers repeating her movements. Soon we were all trying to think of new moves so that we didn't have a roomful of children marching in place for two full minutes between every new move. It was a lot of fun.

After the assembly, we went upstairs and again I was handed the A, B, C book. Since we had just done it outside and I didn't see the good in repeating it (only that they probably figured it was all we could do) I thought I would try to be creative. I came up with the idea of having the kids all gather in groups based on the color of their shirts and teaching them the colors in English by having them all stand up, and yell (of course) their color when I held up that color crayon. We did manage to get them in groups and have them stand up when the teacher said the color of their shirt (in Thai) and I said the color in English, but that was as far as we got. If I had had flash cards and a week or so, I might have accomplished something, but I was proud of my efforts nonetheless. After my little color activity, I was again handed the A, B, Cs.