I've been told that it'll only get better from here...

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So my first day of attempting to teach went as well as expected, 120 children confined to one room for three hours was never going to be stress free. However, sat here listening to other conversations is making me feel slightly better! One guy just walked in and announced that the one thing he’d learnt today was to always use condoms and he then asked where he could get a vasectomy.



After introducing ourselves to the camp and finally settling down the rabble we took our form groups to do drama for an hour, other than the kids being quite shy at first, there were no major problems with my class and I quite enjoyed them calling me Miss Abi! For the next lesson I taught the weather to the younger class, this also went well , they enjoyed my Cbeebies song and making up their own actions but I was thrown by their ability – when I’d asked them to draw posters related to certain weather conditions one 7 year old boy was explaining to me why he’d drawn condensation!



The next class proved much more of a challenge, they were slightly older and after eliciting the subject of weather, it seems they were much more capable than I had anticipated- they were coming up with words like typhoon and blizzard and probably wouldn’t appreciate cbeebies music! I managed to fill the time with games though. Lunch time was an absolute nightmare! The three women from the school had ordered pizzas for 120 kids, this took so long to distribute and caused many problems. Added to this, I was absolutely starving, having had breakfast at 6am before going for a swim that morning.



With the chaos of lunch over it was time to begin our afternoon activities, I was going to run a dance activity but, as we were all in the same room, I decided that this would be too noisy and instead we went with the old favourite of drawing funny people. It turns out that girls take much more pride in their work than boys; the boys scribbled their portion of the picture as fast as possible whilst the girls took a painstakingly long time just to draw a neck! By some stroke of luck, Rosa called time on the activity just as I’d finished and was beginning to panic about what to do next.



We then began the afternoon event; today we did a fashion show, each class was given newspaper, ribbons, magazines, foil and tape and they had to use these resources to make outfits for two members of the group. At first I was worried, there was no way that my class were going to cooperate on this one; they were mostly rebellious nine year old boys who would not be interested in this activity in the slightest. I chose two of the worst behaved to take the role of catwalk models, my logic being that if they were tied up in newspaper then they wouldn’t be able to cause too much trouble! I split the group in two and then asked for ideas for the costumes we could make. Surprisingly, Damien (the boy who I had decided would be the class troublemaker) really got involved with the task and kept making demands like “who’s making me a pair of glasses?” We made him into a warrior with a cape and a hat, if I’m being perfectly honest, I was just relieved that I managed to keep them under control for the hour, even if the boys had spent the entire time making bombs out of newspaper and trying to hide balloons from me. I felt slightly guilty that we were voted second place for our bizarre ensemble, especially considering other people had clearly put much more thought and effort into their costumes that included a mermaid and an extremely cute six-year-old bride!



Home time was another taxing occasion; parents were picking up half the children and the other half was getting the school bus. The only way to distinguish this was by reading the labels on their t-shirts which had now been covered by their new ‘tadpoles’ t-shirts. Hopefully they all got home safely but I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow! Now I’m feeling slightly bloated from polishing off an entire box of leftover pizza and I’m off to do some serious modification of my lesson plans for tomorrow.

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