Teaching at Orphanages

I teach English to three different orphanages in the afternoons. As I teach them when they are home from school I try to make the classes as fun as possible.

Rukemale orphange is a girls orphange with children ranging from 4 to 19. We teach them in three different classes, so their English abilities within a class are more even. We play a variety of English activity games with the younger children and mainly have conversations and chat in English with the older children.

Here are a few of the younger children at Rukemale orphanage

After our first teaching session the matron of the orphanage said we were great teachers and the children loved us. The children call me Rose, because apparently I look like Rose from titanic! They call another volunteer Angelina Jolie! One eighteen year old girl came for a chat with us at the end and was really enthusiatic about us being there and couldn't wait for us to help her with her english essaes and CV and letter writing. She hopes that with extra English help from us she will be able to leave the orphange and get a good job.

Some of the older kids took me for a walk of their grounds, which is about 2 acres and full of fruit trees. There are monkeys that swing from their trees at 5pm every day, which I'm very excited about seeing! They also have there very own cow! However, it  isn't that shocking anymore because in Sri Lanka there are cows everywhere! I have about ten pictures of cows in funny places, such as on the side of the road, or walking along the pavements! Apparently the cows are sacred, so can wonder around and do whatever they like.

Cows relaxing on the side of the road

At Mattegoda orphanage I teach at the children are all in one big class of 40 people, so it was very difficult at the start to get every ones attention.It was also difficult to play an activity that all the children would enjoy. We played games with the children who wanted to join in, while some of the older ones just watched and laughed at us amongst themselves. So, in the last half an hour of the lesson we said goodbye to the little ones and went to a classroom to chat to the older ones. They were very shy at first and didn't want to talk to us, but after a lot of talk about celebrities, films and boyfriends they began to like me and they were soon chatting away in English and asking me lots of questions. I promised to bring them magazine pictures of famous English celebrities next time I visited them.