Daily Report for Sunday, April 4th (Group B)

Many of my English II students have decided to join us on this trip to Cambodia, even though they are missing 3 days of classes and a 2-3 page essay on Autism. In exchange for skipping that assignment, I decided to offer my students write daily blog reports on what kind of things we were doing in Cambodia. We actually will present two reports of today, being that the group that visited Wat Preah Yesu split into two groups: one that primarily focused on teaching and entertaining kids in classes, and another that focused on painting a few houses on the campus. This report, from Linda, is about the teachers.

Today is the first day to serve the kids. We split into two big groups, painting group and teaching group. Our group is the teaching group and we split into to small groups in order to teach different classes. Our first class is the 5th grade kids. Because they loved singing, we basically sang half of the class and used rest of the class to teach. We played simple games using easy words to teach them such as Pictionary, Hang man or spelling games.

At first, they did not seem very interesting in the game, but as we took out candies as gift, they became so excited. We taught three classes in the morning and during the break, we gave the kids some candies. However, as we took out the candy bags, all the kids ran to us and grabbed our hands. Although we told that they could only get one at one time, they just hid their hands with candies behind their back and asked more. I felt they were really cute, but at the same time I also felt so sad for them as we can eat candies everyday.

In the afternoon, Kotomi, Enoch and I chose to teach math together. At first we felt so excited; however, all the students are so shy that they did not even say anything in the whole class. The only sounds they made was laughing. We really felt strange standing there and speaking by ourselves. Later on, we taught the little kids in a bigger room. They are really cute and sweet. Although today is a hard day for everyone, we still enjoy our trips.