In her blog Claire describes the themes and games of the different summer activity weeks as well as making a new Khmer friend....
My
name is Claire and I am one of the five volunteer staff who came to
JWOC from England to run the Summer School this year. I am halfway
through studying an English Language and Literature degree at Oxford
University and I am 19 years old.
I
have had a wonderful time teaching at JWOC over the past month and I
believe this was down to the flexibility of the work that we were given
to undertake. The opportunity to be allowed to plan and arrange our own
teaching schedule gave us real experience in planning, constructing and
carrying out a lesson, as well as the flexibility to be able to adapt
our lessons as we gained teaching experience over the three weeks. For
instance, after the first few days we discovered that playing games with
the children only consumed half the time we had initially planned for
them whilst craft activities took twice as long!
In
the planning period of our four weeks we decided to divide the three
weeks of activities thematically week by week, as we thought this would
help guide the vocabulary we were teaching as well as the type of games
we wanted to plan. Our three themes ended up being Cambodian Life and
Culture, Nature and Around the World. Cambodian Life and Culture Week
consisted of discussing each other’s families and their different
lifestyles, the different types of homes in a Cambodian village and what
it means to be Khmer alongside what it means to be British. During this
week we undertook tasks such as T-shirt painting, friendship bracelets,
creating a friendship tree out of decorated cut-outs of the children’s
hands and playing Khmer New Year games. Another particular highlight was
when four of the students also took it upon themselves to show us
traditional Khmer dancing. A favourite of these activities was the
friendship bracelets; occupying them for an hour and a half, they asked
every day when we could do it again, which due to the flexibility of our
lesson plan we were able to do so.
In
turn, Nature Week was great fun, particularly when it came to the
crafts. Some of the more successful activities we undertook were the
making of animal masks and animal puppets; a giant under-the-sea display
of sharks, octopuses and other sea creatures; a huge snake made out of
decorated toilet rolls and a game of pin-the-tail on a very large
home-made elephant, (which was put together by some of the volunteers.)
Most of these then went on display in the library!
Animal themed games
such as duck-duck-goose were a great way of re-grouping the children
during the tricky period between the first and second session where we
lost some of the children to JWOC lessons or school. My favourite part
of the week was a game we devised where we took the Chicken Licken story
and changed the characters names to animals (for example, Chicken
Licken became Ellie Elephant) and then set the children in a circle and
assigned them different characters from the story. The rule was that if
you heard your character name you had to jump up and run around the
circle back to your place. As the narrative became more repetitive and
more characters became involved meant that this was not as easy as it
seemed. Furthermore, their favourite English song that we taught them
was “in the Jungle”, in the style of The Lion King! To finish the week,
we watched the entire film. Tears came when Mufasa died as did huge
laughs when Timone and Pumba fought off the hyenas.
Finally,
Around the World Week was all about learning where Cambodia is in
relation to the rest of the world and learning about other cultures.
During this week we made flag hands and our own world map, on which we
stuck the hands to make the biggest display of the summer school.
Although I had to fly home two days early before the end of the summer
school, the rest of the week was spent building up to and preparing for
the great JWOC Olympics, a sporting event mighty enough to challenge the
London Olympics that were going on in England!
Finally,
another aspect of the experience I loved was the opportunity of having a
Khmer partner, Sampos, who aside becoming a great friend also helped me
to breach the cultural and language barrier and taught me far more
about Cambodian culture than I could ever have learned as an outsider. I
will miss her very much, although hopefully we will continue to email
frequently! Overall, I had a brilliant month at JWOC and I think the
quality of the work the JWOC team has been doing is best advertised
by the children, who were definitely the best part of the whole
experience for me!
