June planning morning

The team met again on the 30th June for a full morning of planning for our trip.  This was the first occasion that we spend a long time learning songs and practising the activities that we would be doing with the children in Sri Lanka.

We arrived at Dilanee's house in Fleet for around 8am and started off (after a quick cuppa and biscuits) by practising a 'circle time' as we would in a school on our trip. We learned from Maureen, the Chair of Ocean Stars Trust and seasoned Sri Lankan tripper, that the main purpose of circle time is to make the children feel comfortable, relax and focus them, and to introduce ourselves to them.  Games that we played may be familiar to some readers from their school days and included Ring 'o' Roses, Duck Duck Goose and 'Bug in the Rug' (where one child closes their eyes and another child goes under a rug in the middle of the circle, and the first child has to guess who is under the rug). The exercise was great fun, although Hugh was dismayed to find that he had difficulty in crossing his legs fully and contemplated starting up yoga before the trip...

After this we practised reading our story book - 'Wow said the Owl' - as we would to a class of children and we discussed how we could use the book as a tool for teaching.




Above: Kathy (L) and Maureen (R) talk through 'wow said the owl'

The next two sessions that we went through were to practise cutting out, and decorating the owl hats that we will be doing with the children (see pictures below of the variety that was produced) and the collages that each school group will be making as a group.




The final sessions we did involved singing some of the songs that we will be doing with the children (hopefully with ukulele accompaniment from Ruth or Stephen) such as Five Little Ducks.

We rounded off the day with a buffet lunch with delicious English and Sri Lankan food and lots of chatting.  We were joined by Dimithri and Dinesh, two Sri Lankan born graduates who started off the  charity... which is looking to collaborate with Ocean Stars in the future.