Activities, games and ideas

What a week....

So many activities, games and new ideas!

Giant cucumber plant!

Baby vegetables

Last Wednesday we had the opportunity to visit some of our families' kitchen gardens, and we found a myriad of situations: giant cucumber plants blossoming next to half-dead radish…. Some families had lost all their efforts due to too much fertilizer, too much shadow, too much sun, lateness in changing baby plants to wider spaces….… farming has a science of its own, and we all tried to keep a positive attitude: what is alive can be kept, half-dead maybe saved, and fully dead renewed!

In this spirit, we also distributed some more seeds to families interested in augmenting the diversity in their kitchen gardens. Tomorrow we will go on our weekly visit (if the rain doesn’t block us from doing so) so keep an eye on our Facebook account to have the latest news!

During our PM activities we did some drawings and played outdoor games, Thursday we could practice our vocabulary and imagination by playing ‘Hangman’ alongside with some other outdoor activities. Friday was ‘ día del cariño’ the local Valentine’s celebration, cleverly turned into an opportunity for children to show their affection to colleagues by exchanging gifts - 'secret friend' - while hugging the secret friend.

Cake shared by grado 1 students

Grado 3 students and their manually made butterfly candy container/wrapping

Grado 2 unwrapping their gifts!

As in my own culture we do show people our appreciation by the amount of food we offer them, here the same proved to be valid. I was expecting small toys, cards, maybe some school material, jumping out of the carefully wrapped packages…. And I was surprised when I saw affection here is also attached to the stomach: chips, juices, candy, lollipops, soda, chocolates…there was comfort food everywhere! The kids didn’t blink before enjoying their gifts as they shared a morning of playful and affective activities at school!

Typical 'día del cariño' gifts

Taking advantage of the mood, we focused our PM activities in creating Origami hearts to be given to parents as a gift for the occasion. Once they learned how to do it , the kids were so enthusiastic that they were unstoppable, until we ran out of origami paper! After completing our ‘día del cariño’ mission, we played two handfuls of Uno turns and we all went home tired, but happy! 
 

Día del cariño Origami activity

Día del cariño Origami activity

These last two days the temperatures have gone high, after an historic low during the past two weeks, and I think that had an impact in the attendance to our activities. Today they were up for another ‘hangman’ session, followed by treasure hunting and some other games. Sadly, the attendance of girls to the afternoon activities is still much lower than wished, today was an exception as there were few kids yet half were girls!

Hangman game tuesday 16.02.2016

Other ongoing activities: setting up a library with Spanish/English books generously donated to Li Ch’utam, where our friends can borrow books for any taste and finding solutions for our courageous, but old, laptops, that seemingly cannot cope anymore with our precious educational games.

The forecast until Sunday is rain, so let’s see how we can keep our little energetic friends busy in case the rain prevent us from enjoying the freedom and dust that you can only find outdoors, or in a tropical forest.