More at the Camilla School

 The other volunteers and I went to the least disabled part of Camilla school, where they are given lessons and have a fairly normal school life. There are two classes with about twenty in each class, the ages in each class ranging from about four to fifty! A few of the very young children are more able than the older adults! We  assisted the teacher in a maths class. The children had to copy many times each number from one to five in their exercise books. We soon found out that some of the children did not understand what the numbers meant and were simply doing a copying exercise, which is not teaching them what they need to know.  We thought we would introduce more fun ways of learning numbers, and used blocks and team involvement to help them learn to count. We managed to get a lot of them to understand the numbers and got one boy to count to twenty. The teacher said we should teach the class!

Playing with the children at Camilla School

 I've noticed that the children love to clap their hands, and so, in the physiotherapy room, I managed to incorporate some of them clapping, some drumming their hands on a container, some hitting bricks together, one playing the keyboard (we managed to teach her how to play 'twinkle, twinkle, little star'), and some singing, to produce an amateur percussion band. They loved it and we got a lot of the children to join in. Even some of the paralyzed children were laughing along. It surprised me how many English nursery rhymes and other English songs they knew. I felt like we had a breakthrough with the children, with them being happy, active and with music being a way of expressing themselves. We now know that they all love music!