PP day 4

A pretty fabulous and much less stressful day today. To start with, we had an extra hour in the morning back at the hotel to prepare lessons for the day, which meant that we all felt much more confident and happy.

Kids learning

When we got to the centre, my little group was split up into two pairs, and we worked with different classes. J and M worked with P from yesterday morning which left L and I to work with S who we had met in the afternoon. I presented the lesson on ‘what you do after school’ that I’d prepared, using a poster on Australian sports. Then we did a reading activity from their textbook, before taking the kids downstairs to the ‘library’ to look up the Australian sports on YouTube. The kids would much rather play games, but they did look up some of the activities from the poster, and enjoyed watching ballet and karate videos in between playing games and watching music videos (Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’ and Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’ were firm favourites!)

Teaching, teaching teaching…

Lunch was another ‘soup surprise’ with some mushrooms/fungus, chicken stock and a couple of unidentifiable offal pieces. The broth was really tasty today, with a yummy mix of herbs. We weren’t 100% sure on the offal, but at least I tried some of it…

and some more teaching…

The afternoon all four of us worked with S’s class who we had met yesterday. He was caught up in a meeting, so we started with the same sports/after school activity that we had done with the other class, but since we didn’t have access to the computers we broke into groups and used the iPads to practise spelling, writing and pronouncing the words (no wifi to access the internet on the iPads.)

Apparently on Fridays this class spends the last hour watching some comic tv shows/movies and writing a sentence about the funny scenes. Today was a comparison between Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator and The Trouble with Mr Bean. Many giggles ensued!

I piked on the evening dance class, supervising ‘passively’ rather than ‘actively’, as my hands are still sore from last night’s efforts. One of the girls from another group wanted to swap in, so all good!

Khmer Curry (in a coconut!)

Dinner was at another restaurant close to the hotel, the Samaky. After being terribly envious of J’s curry served in a coconut the other night, I decided I needed my own, which was delicious! There were whole spices enlivening the soup, including a chunk of cinnamon bark and a few star anise. They also did really yummy fruit mocktails, so I had a mango refresher, which involved mango, lime, lemonade and all things nice.

Wedding street party

As we walked back to the hotel, we noticed a strange thing on the street outside. A large pink tent was blocking the road. Apparently for weddings here, they just set up a marquee in the middle of the street, no matter if it’s busy or quiet, and party on! Sounds like a lot less trouble than all the paperwork you’d need to do the same thing in Australia!