Wednesday 9th October 2024

We have a very early start here, getting up at around 06:00, and having breakfast next door at 07:00 with our lovely neighbour Razeena, who is providing us with breakfast and dinner each day. This has been wonderful for us, as she is a great cook, and we are enjoying some delicious Sri Lankan cuisine. This morning we were given egg hoppers, which are one of my favourites! A car then picked us up to take us to the Pre-Primary Department, arriving there around 07:45.

There were more lesson observations today, which we are both really enjoying. We are focusing on the Upper Kindergarten pupils (the 6 year-olds), as this is their last year here before they go off to the Junior Department. There are 256 students across 11 classes in this year group alone (with around 3,300 students currently across the whole school). At some point, I will try to take some pictures of the school buildings, which all have 5 floors!

We were both hugely impressed with the quality of the teaching that we saw today, as many of these women (there are no male teachers here at all!) are truly exceptional. It is a privilege to watch them, and to be able to give them such positive feedback after their lessons. After school, I caught up with Harindu, who made me a card for World Teachers Day. I made him a gold frog to thank him, which he loved (his mother sent me two little videos to show his appreciation).

The highlight of the day was being taken after school to one of the Junior Concert Performances at the Town Hall in the centre of Kurunegala, where we had to process in as distinguished guests, before enjoying some very lively singing and dancing from children in the most amazing costumes. A colossal amount of hard work went into producing that! We swam another 20 lengths of the 25m school pool when we got back (500m in total) before popping next door for dinner.

Today's photos are varied, with a few from the lesson observations, and a couple of the concert (I took loads, but they didn't come out so well with the camera on my phone not seeming able to cope with the stage lighting. The final photo is one Harindu's mother took of me with him, and I have also popped in the two little videos that she sent me later on.














Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 31, 2024 at 12:19 AM

    wow, I love the frog too. Perhaps we could have an origami evening one Thursday when you get back.

    ReplyDelete

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