Bye bye India!

This is my last blog post while in India; it feels very strange to be going back to the UK and I'm going to miss the children at Adams School so much. Despite this being our last week, we've managed to get a lot done and it's been really fun.

Our 2nd standard class finally performed The Gruffalo on Saturday and it went very well. We were so proud of them, especially the kids who had lots of lines to learn- they were pretty much word perfect! The costumes were all made by me and Izzy, so some of them were quite interesting. The snake was wearing my old green t-shirt with yellow spots stuck on and she looked awesome! The butterflies were wearing paper wings which kept falling off, but overall it was quite successful and they looked really cute. The weeks of intensive and stressful rehearsals definitely paid off, but it does mean that we all know The Gruffalo inside out and can recite it all off by heart!

We have finished the nursery classroom wall after hours of slaving, sometimes in the dark during power-cuts. I think it was the snacks and shouts of "Wow Mam, so super!" from passing children that kept us going, as it seemed to last forever. All modesty aside, it looks pretty awesome! We discovered that Izzy has severe OCD and is a massive control freak, as everything that me or Sarah did was re-done later by her!

During the whole year, my parents have been sending over lots and lots of story books for the school. We were planning on opening a school library with them, but in true Indian style, the room we were told we could use hasn't actually been built yet! However, all the books have been so so useful for our lessons and they have definitely helped to improve the children's English. Thank you so much to Mum and Dad and to the Bossés for the amazing amounts of books.

Back in February we did a week in school about individuality; we sent some photos off to a charity called Inside Out who printed them out for us. We finally got round to sticking them up this week. The photos have a picture of each child holding up a piece of paper saying why they are different from the others. We stuck them up on the wall opposite the school, we've had lots of nice comments about them and the children who are in the photos are very proud to have their faces on the wall.

I'm so so sad to be going and I wish I could stay for longer. Hopefully we have helped the children a bit and their English will continue to improve, but for now that's all from me in India. England here I come!

Our Final Few Weeks of Teaching

We are nearing the end of our time in India and our time teaching at Adams School, so I thought I'd write a bit about what we've been doing in our last few weeks at school.

Painting
Vinay agreed to let us paint some of the classroom walls, and recently we were let loose on the nursery classroom. We decided to get all of the children to do a hand print and write their names next to it. It was pretty chaotic and messy to organise, but once we'd finished, it looked really cool! We're now painting the alphabet on the back wall, so hopefully that will be ready soon.

Ceilidh dancing
Thanks the fresh influence of Sarah and her Scottish ways, we did some ceilidh dancing with the children on Saturday. It was really fun and the kids enjoyed it a lot, even some of the teachers had a go! We did the Gay Gordons and the Canadian Barn Dance, which me and Izzy know so well now. We did it with 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th, so we were basically dancing constantly from 9-12:30, we were exhausted by the end, it's the most exercise we've done in ages!

Egg drop
With our 5th and 6th standard classes, we decided to do the egg drop challenge; they were divided into teams and given an egg and various materials. Their aim was to create a contraption to protect the egg when dropped from a height. Each team got 1 metre of string, 3 plastic bags and 3 balloons and could use them in any way they wanted. When they were all ready, we went to the top of the stairs and dropped them down, one by one. Unfortunately every egg smashed! I reassured the kids that it was actually possible to keep the egg in tact and we weren't just trying to make them look stupid, but I'm not sure if they were convinced!

Treasure hunts
With our 5th and 7th standard classes we asked them to create treasure hunts for each other. It took a long time to explain to the younger ones how this would work, but once they understood, they all got very excited and rushed around the school looking for places to hide things. They wrote a string of clues, leading to the
treasure- my old toy bear. It was carried out with varying levels of success; the boys in 5th had gone a bit overboard, and several clues were underground, so deep that the girls were digging for about 10 minutes until they found it! Another clue was stuck in a tiny hole very high up in a tree, which unsurprisingly no-one found. I was made to sit away from the group, as I kept giving them too many hints, because I couldn't cope with seeing them search fruitlessly for so long. In the end, I had to go to my next class, and I assumed the kids had given up too, until about 30 minutes later, they burst into my class proudly brandishing the old brown bear! They have a lot of patience! The girls' treasure hunt was a lot easier, mainly because they were a lot kinder with their hiding places and clues. Whilst the clues from 5th standard were generally along the lines of "blue colour and has books in", the 7th standard treasure hunt clues were extremely cryptic, and baffled me and Izzy. One of them said: "There is a blue dragon, if you make him laugh, he will show you his secret." The kids in that class have amazing levels of English and they're so intelligent.

Letters from York
A few weeks ago, we got lots of our children to write letters about themselves to send to Copmanthorpe Primary School in York. They were quite confused about it all, and for some reason, expected me and Izzy to fly back to England to deliver the letters personally. They all wrote a bit about themselves and then a few questions they wanted the English children to answer. We sent them off in the post and received the replies recently, which was really cool! The kids were very interested and really excited by the fact they'd got personalised letters, some of them set off writing replies straight away, with Rayan in 5th declaring that he now had "a best friend in England!" The hardest part of this exercise was trying to explain what toad in the hole and yorkshire puddings are to children who eat rice or chapattis every day! Thank you very much to Judith and everyone at Copmanthorpe for the letters! Thank you as well to Alex and Daisy, who answered some questions from the younger classes by email.

The Gruffalo play
Our 2nd standard class are mad keen on the book 'The Gruffalo' by Julia Donaldson, so we decided to stage our own little production of it. Unfortunately there are a lot more children than characters, so some of them will be starring as trees, butterflies and frogs, but they don't seem too bothered! We have been rehearsing every day, and although it's been slightly stressful at times, it seems to be coming together. Most of the children know their lines and it's pretty funny hearing them say things like "It's frightfully kind of you Snake but no, I'm going to have tea with a gruffalo." I just hope they start speaking like that in real life! The show will be on Saturday, so hopefully it'll be ok.

I can't believe we're leaving India and the school so soon, and I'm going to be so sad to say goodbye to it all. We've still got a couple of weeks left, so we'll make the most of that!